Tartufi di carta. Dal «mondo infero» al «postinferno»

Abstract

The debut of the essay recalls, following Camporesi, the dissolution of the chthonic and infernal for the benefit of more aseptic and anemic contemporary ‘post-hell’. The work verifies the (scarce) presence of truffles in Italian literature, pursuing its symbolic implications on the imaginary level in Fogazzaro, Pavese, Montale, Arpino, Gadda: authors in whom, however, the truffle is never the nucleus of literary invention. Instead, it appears central in an honest work of ‘para literature’ such as Stefano Quaglia’s Il Tartufo e la polvere. In the thriller novel, the truffle is the narrative engine that moves an amused representation, or rather a caricature, of a whole geographical-territorial, social, economic, anthropological environment: the contemporary post-hell of a peasant world crossed by unsuspected thrills and fundamentally flawed by very modern and unspeakable business-criminal plots.