It’s like a solid-waste version of “trickle-down theory”: This nightmare vision can hardly even be seen as symbolic, it’s so directly familiar to us as a variation on the class-based shit-storm we navigate and rationalize every day. One would find - if you’ll permit me the term - human excrement, which fell from above in ever increasing amounts. But later, the nature of the waste started to become - how to put this? - somewhat more challenging and personal. At first I didn’t take much notice: it was old furniture, books, papers, kitchen scraps. What leaves me baffled is that the Administration has begun to use the stairwell shaft as a garbage dump. In one letter, the stranger describes his apartment building as a tall cylindrical tower with a demolished stairwell that necessitates he climb the walls to reach his living quarters.īut the physical exertion isn’t the part that bothers him: The effusions of “the stranger,” a batty anonymous letter writer who sends long, plaintive communiqués to the novel’s unnamed narrator, perfectly express this disturbing tone of dark comedy. The Twenty Days of Turin - Giorgio De Maria’s brilliant and eerily prescient 1977 horror novel, available in a new, vivid translation from Ramon Glazov - has a chipper vein of humor running erratically through its miasma of black dread.
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