A long story – or perhaps a very short novel – aboutgrotesque horror of corporate work. Antonio Amodio’s debut book, ‘The meeting is not over’, published by 256, one of the few (and commendable for its scouting work) Italian publishing houses specializing in short stories, summarizes in less than 90 pages the obtuse violence of the capitalist system of big business.
The author stages, in the offices of the imaginary Turin insurance company ‘La Sabauda’, a meeting between the director and four employeestransforming a normal meeting into a claustrophobic nightmare in which everyone will be faced with the potential, horrible consequences of their acts contrary to ‘the established order’. Horror or comedy But, fortunately, what should terrify us also ends up amusing us.
A graduate in History of North American Cinema and a fan of David Mamet (openly mentioned), Amodio has in fact organized on the page a farce with a flavor of Italian comedy laced with hydrochloric acid. Employees are characterized byuse of different dialects e the director monster he has the features of a clumsy travet-sized polyphemus, while outside the meeting room reality becomes a dark backdrop inhabited by faceless vengeful creatures, reminiscent of the presence of certain B-series horror films from overseas.
The game is always double: when the fantastic component takes over, lowering the credibility threshold, the author draws on irony to bring the dialogues back to earth; the more mean the characters appear, the more the world around them surpasses them in baseness, with the result of always empathize who reads with the bad guys. The text recalls, in some passages, the imagery of the first Ammaniti, but winking at him from a great distance, while looking towards Fantozzi and the poetics of the poor Christ who would do anything to escape a destiny from the mechanism of the great gear.
It’s too early to say whether Amodio – who this year has refined his tastes and experiences collaborating on the lyrics of Wonderland on Rai4one of the most interesting programs in the entire national schedule – is destined to leave its mark in bookstores, but it is worth waiting for it with fingers crossed for more substantial tests over longer distances. For now, with this dry debut, it has certainly left a scratch on the bodywork of the car we go to work with every day.