Ferrovie del Messico

If you are looking for adventure, you will find plenty of it in this novel. If you are looking for literature, you will get a taste of it with this novel. The places and times: Asti, Italian Social Republic, February 1944; up and down the railways of Mexico, between the 1920s and 1930s. The characters (not all): Cesco Magetti, a soldier in the National Republican Railway Guard, tormented by toothache, tasked with compiling a map of Mexico’s railways (the order comes from above, very much from above); Tilde Giordano, a beautiful and crazy girl, steeped in literature, with whom Cesco falls instantly and madly in love; Steno, Tilde’s devoted boyfriend, a partisan without arms; Don Tiberio, a city priest confined to Roccabianca because of certain of his insane passions; Epa, a Samoan cartographer (from German Samoa); Adolf the Führer and his wife Eva, struggling with the abuse of anglicisms; Angelo a.k.a. Angelino a.k.a. Lito Zanon, a cemetery worker boiling corpses; Mec the mute, his companion from the days when they built railways together in South America; the two Marys, both named Maria; Bardolf Graf, administrative clerk, unaware of the motionless engine of the whole story; Hector and Nikolaus, well-informed and mysterious regulars of the secret nightclub l’Aquila agonizzante, close to the partisans; Gustavo Adolfo Baz, author of the book Historia poética y pintoresca de los ferrocarriles en México; Edmondo Bo, brakeman-poet, or poet-brakeman, or brakeman and poet, in any case an alcoholic and opium addict; the horrible Obersturmbannführer Hugo Kraas, lover of Italian art, questionable golfer and ruthless SS man; Giustina Decorcipo, Hector and Nikolaus’ orphanage companion, raped and murdered and thrown on the side of the road at the age of sixteen; Feliciano, dead child. With Ferrovie del Messico, Gian Marco Griffi has given us a great choral novel, hilarious and moving, playful and profound, realistic and fantastic, relentlessly gripping, written with an almost spoken language, always cordial in both the comic and dramatic registers, and yet very literate. While Griffi’s tutelary deities are undoubtedly Jorge Luis Borges and Carlo Emilio Gadda (and Roberto Bolaño, Thomas Pynchon and – logically – Monty Python peep in here and there), the result is entirely original.