Lo splendore. Vol. 1: L’infanzia di Hans

What do we know about reality? The reality of experience is known to us: we know facts, events, causes, places, individuals. But at the heart of experience lies a symbolic weave: real reality. During the nineteenth century, as the industrial revolution established technology as the main tool for knowledge and world domination, novelists – from Balzac to Flaubert – attempted to scientifically represent the reality of experience; but in the transition to the twentieth century, it was realised that realism failed to satisfy the need for meaning, that experience was fragmented and dispersed, that real reality slipped through the cracks. Joyce, Proust, Döblin, Mann, Broch, Musil, Hesse, Canetti and others attempted a new, voracious, spiritual novel, overflowing from canonical forms. Pier Paolo Di Mino’s ‘The Splendour’ is part of this modernist tradition; but it has its roots much deeper, in the great biblical and pre-biblical narratives, in kabbalistic and alchemical wisdom – the title is a homage to the ‘Zohar’ -, in the comic and parodistic novels of Cervantes and Sterne. And at the same time it is a roguish and sometimes grandiose folk epic, as gripping as a Dumas novel. Lo splendore. L’infanzia di Hans tells the story of the childhood of Hans Doré, born in 1911 in a Berlin suburb and destined to become the “true king”, the one who – without knowing it – will be able to save the world from the machine of necessity; but it is above all the story of his direct and indirect genealogy, in which memorable characters – the itinerant curator Hermine, the pious Clea, the brutal Gustav, the fervent socialist Joseph – crowd in, each with their own task within the subtle plot that holds the fate of humanity. Their lives are disputed by two opposing factions, who seem to move with agility in space and time: on one side the Abelian Hubel and the Cainite Ginzburg, on the other the priest Kircher and a mysterious bookseller. It will be the latter who, by means of a visionary blue book of images alone, will attempt to guide Hermine, Clea, Gustav, Joseph and Hans himself towards splendour.