Massimiliano Nuzzolo, "La felicità è facile"

A good writer is like an actor, he interprets, he doesn’t necessarily give you his vision, he identifies with the characters even when they think in the opposite way. And Massimiliano Nuzzolo is a good writer, his stories have a precise and studied language, “supervised” as they say, of great effect, and also have a good framework and original arguments. “Happiness is easy” is a collection that reconciles with the genre of the short story, set aside in recent years, or used as an expedient by those who cannot express themselves with a wider breath. Here, however, there is content — even messages conveyed in a subliminal way — there is a structured and harmonious development of the plot, and finally, there is a caustic and fun but also lyrical style.

“A thin dew ready to fix itself to the bones and to scrape away an anonymous night like a thousand others, in gradual variations of brightness and color which, approaching without any hurry to the morning, seemed to follow the uncertain path of Gio, busy returning home later after a sleepless night to say the least. “

“When I’m there alone, that is practically three hundred and fifty-six days this year, excluding the week in Cuba, I look at the wall of the cemetery, at the lights that twinkle in the night and I think about how many fucking dead there are in a cemetery, how many people died in all these years, from when they made the cemetery in Mestre to today, about when those crumbling and semi-sunken graves were new and ready for the inauguration, I think about how many corpses and human remains more or less large a meter can contain a cube of fatty earth, how many millions of worms slip slow and good-natured in search of fresh meat … Then Marika arrives and gives me a blowjob. Thank God “

The recurring motifs in these stories are various, among others the marginalization of the different, illness and death stand out. Death is a theme that runs through all contemporary fiction and even poetry. Never before do young people feel it close by, with the increase in tumors and accidents we are returning to the life expectancy of the nineteenth century and the end becomes a companion again. Death is chosen in “Il volo”, it is a disturbing thought in “The parking lot next to the cemetery”, it is heartbreaking absence in “Economy of speech”, it is a reflection in “Ma and pa lying buried dead”.

“What can make sense here? Talk to the Nothing? Talking to a photo? To a stone? Perhaps it makes more sense to say something to the grass or to the flowers “.

The message, the ideology, the content are spread over all the stories and allowed to emerge by contrast. The situation itself gives rise to ideas, ethics and emotions. So here is the girl who commits suicide in order not to become like the adults she despises, in order not to be assimilated into the system. Here is the down, the toxic and the psychologically unstable who show us reality from their angle, capable of making our “normality”, even our religion, appear as distorted.

“Then I sat in front of the altar with the other children and halfway through the service I received the body of Christ for the first time. It was a thin white thing that stuck to my palate and I thought but how is Christ made of paper? “

Some stories are very beautiful, such as “We are all equal before God (just pay the fee), where a seemingly insignificant ambient note — the television on on a teleshopping — brings out two opposite social situations.

The contents are affected by the author’s cultural background, his literary, musical and cinematographic tastes. In the stories we talk about films like “Alien” and “E.T.”, but also about electronic music, about Pavese, Wilde, Baudelaire, Camus, Hemingway, and these art forms are used to discuss, in virtuosic combinations, of love, concentration camps, prejudice, marginalization.

Nuzzolo’s words are never random, they are chosen with a patience that repays every effort and gives an impression of smoothness. But, behind it, we intuit all the painstaking work of file and research. Note, for example, the lack of punctuation in “Mestre toxic”, to mimic the mental confusion and motor retardation of the drug-addled character. Alcohol drunk to forget absences, drugs that numb and blunt, the antidepressants of the final story, represent the only chance to escape an easy, very easy, constant and widespread unhappiness.

However, pure narration prevails, as it should be in fiction, reflection is left to the reader, the author limits himself to showing, and also to having a little fun behind us, always, however, with a held motional participation, underlying and yet essential. Long live the storytelling, therefore, long live the narrative.