Author:
Alessandro Leogrande
Publishing house:
Feltrinelli
Date of publication:
June 2017
Helena Janeczek, Carlo Lucarelli, Vanni Santoni, Alessandro Leogrande, Diego De Silva, Gioacchino Criaco and Evelina Santangelo. Seven authors, each with his or her own history, sensibility and voice, re-actualize with as many unpublished stories, written specifically for The Found Agenda, the core of Paolo Borsellino’s commitment and the questions still open twenty-five years after the Via D’Amelio massacre – the truth denied, the need for justice, the misappropriation, the failure to find it, the resistance of politics… They succeed without the need for the chronicling of facts: they succeed by inventing stories. “A writer who does his duty,” Marco Balzano points out in the introduction, “is first and foremost a writer who writes well and knows how to deliver a story to others. We wanted a book that was alive, completely cast in the present day, without further mythologizing, without any more hypocritical sanctification, which only served to place in an inaccessible Olympus those who belonged to the community and only for it sacrificed themselves. Literature, on the other hand, when it is literature, always performs an operation of rapprochement.”
A rapprochement that is also a journey from North to South – Helena Janeczek (Lombardy), Carlo Lucarelli (Emilia-Romagna), Vanni Santoni (Tuscany), Alessandro Leogrande (Lazio), Diego De Silva (Campania), Gioacchino Criaco (Calabria) and Evelina Santangelo (Sicily) -, “a passing of the baton,” writes Gianni Biondillo recalling how the book was born, “to tell not so much where we were at the death of the two magistrates, but where perhaps we have been in these years, all of us: Those who were silent, those who were indifferent, those who were disappointed, those who were cowardly, those who were always, stubbornly opposed, in the front row.”
One resistant thread binds the stories in this anthology to each other: a red agenda. It looks out from the page declined in different ways, once it has torn sheets, another is swollen with theater tickets, but always intending to remember the one that belonged to Paolo Borsellino-which contained notes, names and perhaps revelations about the Capaci massacre, disappeared immediately after the July 19, 1992 Mafia attack and never reappeared.
“The finding of the red agenda metaphorically is the recovery of a form of dignity, of a sense of things finally unraveling, of an awareness that another world, another life is more possible than ever.”