Italian | Italy | Micro-Stories
December, 2017Superwoobinda is a collection of "micro-stories" (or "polaroids," as the author calls them) written by Aldo Nove. At the time of its publication in 1998, it was extremely popular--some call it a cult book--and played an important role in the Young Cannibals Italian literary movement. The Young Cannibals wrote about the reality of Italy during that period in an exasperated way (often with the inclusion of brand-name consumerism, hyper or surreal violence, and black humor). They were highly influenced by Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction (1994).
Superwoobinda depicts the Italy of the 1990s, an Italy that is marked by consumerism and an unnatural relationship with television. Silvio Berlusconi, a millionaire business and media mogul, has recently been elected prime minister. Italian television has been privatized, Berlusconi owning three out of the seven national TV channels, thus creating the Italian commercial TV empire. Nove chose to use the language of television in his writing—to highlight the absurdity, the horror, of a reality mediated by it. There are many different styles found here, often with repetition and syntactic disruption, and the fragmented stories mimic the rhythm of flipping through channels. There is a conglomeration of voices and perspectives, the sad and disturbed characters disconnected from one another, and from themselves, all brainwashed by the TV and its advertising.
Superwoobinda is an extreme and exaggerated social commentary. Its stories are both comic and tragic, scandalizing and iconoclastic, and they have an overload of lurid content (be forewarned). What follows is a selection of eight of these stories.
- Hope Campbell Gustafson
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