As usual, it arrives on FIRST Arte Sunday's Story. This week we find a story by Mirko Tondi, a Florentine writer, born in 77, who received a special mention at the Troisi prize (2005), published poems and stories in anthological volumes (including a story for Mondadori crime novels, 2010), some novels which he likes to define as "experimental" without knowing if this is actually the case.
“2001 Odyssey in the megastore” looks like a stream of consciousness that then flows into the fantastic. A first-person account of a man locked up in a megastore who, after the shutters have lowered and the padlocks have been closed, has tea with Oscar Wilde (at the vending machine), converses about life with the protagonist of Casablanca and then lets himself be rocked from the voices of Elvis and Frank (Sinatra), to get involved in a conversation between Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Stanley Kubrick, hoping to make a good impression by showing off a decent cinematographic culture.
I can't tell you how this story started, I just don't remember how I ended up in it. But maybe it doesn't even matter, because the preambles are often useless and only serve to buy time. What really interests is the juice, the precious distillate that is obtained when you eliminate everything that surrounds it, a few drops that if you see them collected between two hands make you think of how little life remains once you have removed lumps and skimmed and filtered and stuff like that, in short, we don't have much left if you remove the superfluous. In short, we have reached the moment in which that stupid expression appears on the face that appears mechanical, out of control, while you are watching a film and you say to yourself "here, now something has happened".
Incipit of “2001 Odyssey in the megastore”
