Simone Giusti's "Pisa Connection"

Simone Giusti, whose delicate story for children “Il giardino di bosco fitto”, I read, inaugurates a Pulp series, with the short novel “Pisa Connection”. A whole different style, a whole different grit but always the same excellent writing.

The story revolves around an Islamic attack to be carried out against the prime minister, while he gives a speech in Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa. I shudder to think that the novel was published a few days before the tragic events in Paris and, then, the drugged terrorist thugs, who a laugh should bury, don’t even seem so grotesque anymore and seem to have come out of the news in recent days.

“The guy said he had followed their movements, especially those of Fael who had a facebook portal with three hundred and twenty-six subscribers on which he shared fundamentalist ideas along with rap videos, photos of semi-naked women and kebab in piadina promotions. The page was called Al-Kebab, on the cover it had a ninja slicing a red onion. The inscription in Arabic in golden and glittering letters said: there will remain only one. A stunned user once reported the cover to him as a beheading photo. “

The odyssey of Jimbo is intertwined with this attack, a junkie desperate for his daily dose of methamphetamine. Jimbo is not described except for a few strokes: the thinning hair, the fluttering undershirt, the battered scooter. Jimbo is one of the many drug addicts we pass on the street, dodging them with a little disgust when they ask us for coins “for petrol”. His existence focuses every day, from sunset to dawn, entirely on finding the drug. Jimbo doesn’t think, except for what he needs, he doesn’t care about the surrounding world, he doesn’t eat, he doesn’t drink but every night he goes on a mythical journey, a sort of quest of the drug that will give him the flash and make him immune to pain and capable of toiling for another twenty-four hours.

Around him swarms a myriad of bizarre and squalid characters, to whom a chapter is dedicated from time to time, so you slide from one chapter to another, from one character to another, while, at the same time, the plot advances and we find ourselves at the end in the blink of an eye.

What is described is not the Pisa of when I was attending university in the eighties, it is the city that comes to meet us as soon as we go out to the station square, amidst kebab shops, pizza slices and Chinese junk for tourists. It is an underclass of whores and pimps, of immigrants, of drug addicts, of carabinieri, of naif terrorists and policemen who seem to come out of a Police School movie (see the legendary Tackleberry), all scanned from the inside without censorship, in their meanest thoughts. The only pity is for the story of the prostitute Fatjona, told with emotion, and that shines through. Everything else is filth, degradation, drugs, sex, marginalization, in short, it is pulp.

Simone Giusti seems to treat the arguments with irony and lightness, seeking sympathy for the poor, sad, Jimbo but it is clear that he knows what he is talking about, he has not created random figures but has documented himself and the description of the post-attack has something ominously prophetic about it.

Under the simplified language and profanity, there are many levels of reading, but not only, also a lot of cinema, in a multimedia that characterizes young authors. In short, cultural baggage no longer has to be only literary, since the collective imagination can now draw on multiple sources, such as cinema, television, comics, videogames and even role-playing games, of which Giusti declares himself passionate.