“All those good people”. Meeting with the writer Guglielmo Pispisa (Marco Felder)

Culture spreads and is transmitted, at the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria. Appointment on Thursday, February 27th, 2020, at 5.30 pm, in the Conference Room, with the writer Guglielmo Pispisa, author of the novel “All that good people” (Rizzoli, 2019) together with Jadel Andreetto (by the pseudonym of Marco Felder).

The meeting, organized in collaboration with the Calabria International Writers Center, is an opportunity to talk about migration, exchanges, contaminations and cultural clashes, crimes and mysteries, in a literary key.

Speakers for greetings: the director of the MArRC, Carmelo Malacrino, and the president of the CIS of Calabria, Loreley Rosita Borruto.

Together with the author they will discuss: Professor Paola Radici Colace, full professor of Classical Philology at the University of Messina, honorary president and director of the scientific committee of the CIS; the architect Ottavio Amaro, general director of the Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria and member of the scientific committee of the CIS; the journalist and musicologist Francesco Villari, member of the scientific committee of the CIS.

Civil lawyer, Pispisa made his debut in fiction with the comic-grotesque novel “Multiplo” (Bacchilega Editore, 2004), immediately noticed by Einaudi, who published his second work, the following year: “Perfect city”. He has written for the most important publishing houses: Marsilio, Il Saggiatore, Mondadori. He founded the literary ensemble “Kai Zen”.

The novel that will be presented at the MArRC, of ​​a characteristic comic-noir genre, tells the story of Tanino Barcellona, ​​an extrovert and impulsive Sicilian policeman who has worked in Rome for many years and would like to return “home”, but who instead is transferred as a punishment to Bolzano. Here, together with the “rough” colleague Karl Rottensteiner, whom he forms the “strange investigative couple” with, he faces a crime case – a chain of murders that wreaks havoc on the icy and peaceful only apparently northern city, with a serial murderer suffocates the its victims without a trace – which is intertwined with the contemporary history of the area, South Tyrolean irredentism, and local culture. From the comparison of the characters of the two main characters, with their respective different baggage of traditions and contradictions, a little-known, but very suggestive, social and historical cross-section of our multiform country emerges, between the dark visions of the noir and an unsettling and irresistible irony.

A scene from the novel takes place in the bar of the Bolzano Museum.

Pispisa says: “It is a crime story set in Bolzano, which investigates the recent history of South Tyrol, which since the Mussolini era has experienced a rift between the Italian and German parts, even violent ones, with more or less evident conflicts, which have had relapses that continue to the present day. There is a quote, which we report on the back cover of the book, which is valid as a universal maxim, to summarize the meaning of the novel – the writer continues-: ‘Everyone is someone else’s nigger’. There is always a complex game of interchangeable and often coexisting roles of victims and executioners, for every people, for every group as well as for every individual. There is always someone to download social tensions on. It is the trait common to the events of history”.

Participation in the conference is free and open to all.