The 1977 novel The Twenty Days of Turin, which attracted a cult following in Italy, is finally out in an English translation. Cultural commentator Giorgio De Maria wrote the horror story as a metaphor of the political violence that overtook his country in the ’70s. And yet, as described by translator Ramon Glazov in his introduction, Twenty Days also seems to predict social networking in all its worst aspects. De Maria writes of “dialogues across the ether” by ordinary folks displaying their intimacies—many of them “people with no desire at all for regular human connection.” The author’s sophisticated irony will remind readers of fellow Italian (and Turin resident) Umberto Eco.
