M. L’uomo della provvidenza

At the dawn of 1925 the youngest Italian Prime Minister the man who took the blame for Matteotti’s murder as if it were his own merit, lies upside down in his flea-filled alcove-apartment. Benito Mussolini, the ‘son of the century’ who in 1919 sat in the office of the People of Italy, ready to face his enemies after being ruinously defeated in the elections, is now a winner on all fronts but appears to be at death’s door due to an ulcer that is eating him up from the inside. This is how the second half of the unfortunate epic of Fascism narrated by Scurati – with the structure and style of the novel – begins. M. is no longer told from an internal point of view because he becomes a distant entity, ‘a chrysalis of power converted into a butterfly of absolute solitude’. All around him the old comrades tear each other apart like a pack of dogs. The Duce instead becomes hypermetrope: he wants to measure himself and his power only against distant things and the great History. He appoints Augusto Turati to settle the quarrels among the hierarchs; he forgets all gratitude to Margherita Sarfatti; he tries to appease his daughter Edda’s ardor by giving her in marriage to Galeazzo Ciano; he entrusts Badoglio and Graziani with the African mission, celebrated by the rhetoric of the immensity of the dunes but fought in reality as the dirtiest of wars, culminating in the horror of gas and concentration camps.

The journey of M. Il figlio del secolo – a literary case of pure originality but also an occasion for an unprecedented reawakening of national self-consciousness – continues here in a surprising way, lifting the veil of oblivion over people and facts of the utmost importance and experiencing an even more daring interweaving between narrative and sources of that time. Until 1932, the tenth anniversary of the revolution: when M. raises the impressive, ghostly shrine of the fascist martyrs, and more than honoring past sorrows, he seems to foreshadow future carnage.

“Scurati removes Mussolini and his hierarchs from the historiographical solemnity and places them in the collective imagery at the top or bottom of their miseries’ – Il Fatto Quotidiano

“M is the best narrative vaccine currently in circulation against new forms of populism” – Sette, Corriere della Sera