Paolo Mantioni, "Le età della vita"

“It seems to me that you don’t truly believe in anything you do, you don’t wear yourself out completely, you continue to maintain a control that you need to stay out. But in this way you risk staying out of literature, work and even life.”

There are people who look at themselves from the outside and are never convinced or immersed in what they are doing, they always stay one step outside. Instead, to live, to make a career, to fit well into the system, you need to be aggressive, disciplined, willing to compromise, and not to have doubts. The protagonist of “The Ages of Life”, the author’s youthful alter ego, is one of these people.

The narrator is a university freshman in Literature who, to support his studies, works at night in the general markets of Rome, as a fish wholesaler. Apparently happy, he loves studying, which makes him fly to intellectual skies from which he feels irremediably attracted, but he also has a good relationship with his work, able to keep him down to earth, to offer him the necessary detachment to see things objectively and not get lost in a hyperuranium of philological abstractions. He also has a girlfriend who gives him all of herself, who loves him, who encourages him to study, to build a proper position for himself.

His work puts him in contact with a colorful, picturesque, popular humanity, of which he feels part and from which, at the same time, he distances himself as a cultured person.

“From time to time, as usual, he briefly interrupted the reading to savor its taste more peacefully, to prolong and hold back the enjoyment, almost as if to compare it with what was ugly and incomprehensible around him.”

But he too belongs to that world, he too speaks that plebeian dialect, he too is one of them, without, however, being so completely.

“This was the popular world from which he came and which he loved to frequent now that books helped him detach himself from it, now that he could see it even through the eyes of the most loved authors and that he could break it down with the analytical schemes of the most popular scholars.”

He manages to analyze the linguistic mechanisms and human dynamics, juggling between the two worlds, keeping himself in balance as long as possible. But there comes a moment when something breaks and the alienation grows, the sense of strangeness explodes.

“Something was changing. Between the “cacatore” of Pieretto and the “sublime” of Patrizi da Cherso the gap was becoming too wide. He risked getting lost in a dried up land, abandoned by both. The sense of not belonging was gripping him.”

Even in lives that seem to flow more easily, that seem to slide on excellent tracks, something screeches, brakes, blocks the flow: it’s called fear and it can derail you.

There are two fears that hover in the novel, one is the unacknowledged one that nothing happens, that everything goes as it should, that the girlfriend becomes a wife, precarious work becomes stable employment, studies lead to a degree and a permanent job; the other, instead, that the imponderable happens, the waste, the bad joke of fate ready to change everything, to destroy, revolutionize, disrupt.

Both of these anxieties are identified by the character of Carmine Avagliano, a man on the edge, borderline between an almost normal existence and a homeless one. Carmine represents a casual encounter for the protagonist but one that strikes you. Carmine was once a hopeful graduate and about to get married. Then Elsa, his Swiss fiancée, died in an accident, and Carmine slowly drifted away, stopped studying, stopped working, while maintaining his lodgings, albeit stripped of all furnishings, maintaining a semblance of regularity made up of sleep , of walks, of a window from which to still look out.

Carmine is what the protagonist could become if he let himself be submerged by nothingness, but he is also, subtly, a positive symbol of rebellion against the system, against a known and predictable life.

The protagonist decides to put Carmine’s papers in order. He doesn’t know why he feels the need to do it, given that fixing the life of the other means unhinging his own, not going to work, missing university classes, arguing with his girlfriend. More than Carmine’s sheets accumulate in orderly piles, more than the life of the protagonist is blown.

“I want to understand, I want to make sense of it.”

“The world doesn’t make sense”

“The world, no. But every single component of it, yes.”

The need to archive, to catalogue, is the same that leads the author to describe all market operations with painstaking detail, as if by analyzing what surrounds him, he can exercise some form of control over his own life — perhaps not quite the desired one — and on himself, on his own impulses, on that mixture of high and low, of instinct and culture, which characterizes it without ever merging completely, and which is also reflected in the language, incisive, with attention to the smallest details, but intersected by the Roman dialect. “Can a Roman with a degree in literature ever get rid of the Roman dialect?”

Refined and proletarian, literate and vulgar, they alternate and intersect as warp and weft throughout the novel.

“But fuck you!

The subsequent apotropaic gesture (rubbing the testicles, in short) was absolutely inevitable. Superstition energetically accompanied to the door, tolerant but determined, by Montesquieu, Leopardi and Lévi — Strauss, peeked out the window, and who was its stool intertwining the fingers at the groin? An amused and mischievous “Richetto er pesciarolo”, known as Lo Scaltro”

At first glance, it would appear to be Pasolini’s linguistic operation itself, only that here the mimesis is total and there is no lyricism in Mantioni’s language, only a lucidly rational operation. However, despite this intellectualism, despite the meticulousness with which certain scenes are described, the novel is not tiring, it flows, it creates anticipation and curiosity in the reader.

Then there is the psychoanalytic trend, even if not fully developed, which is found in the childhood stories at the end of the novel. It is as if the author were hinting at something which, however, he does not dare to talk about. If we could delve into the meanderings of psychoanalysis, he tells us, the discoveries would be so many and such that a single story would not be enough, the inner excavation could really bring life out of the self-imposed schemes, transforming it into a lose cannon, into a letter without a place that can fly at the first gust of wind.