ENZO

Description

Enzo Menichini lived a real life in Buenos Aires, far from Italy—a life as an art gallerist, a man of the avant-garde. Enzo, Somodi’s extraordinary novel, traces with both freedom and rigor that journey, spanning from fascism to Bonino, from furtive sex over there to Marcelo T. de Alvear Street in Buenos Aires. It is no coincidence that the novel is preceded by an epigraph from Saer, in which language is related to splinters. In Somodi’s novel, language appears splintered, sharp, like a scalpel that knows exactly what it is seeking.

And what Somodi seeks is what we, the readers, find: a text that closely follows a life, a gaze that opens—not in childhood, but in that pivotal moment that is the army—and closes at the end, always with a smile on his face. A novel that, like the layers of an onion about to ripen, describes a life, a world, an era, a past that never quite stops passing.

Carla Maliandi