Angelo Cennamo is a lawyer from Salerno and a passionate visionary reader, capable of seeing the statue of freedom from the Trieste promenade. Nine years ago opened a blog dedicated to American literature, driven by an authentic and contagious passion. Called him Telegraph Avenuelike the famous Californian avenue that unites Berkeley and Oakland, and like the novel by Michael Chabon who has a record shop for epicenter, Brokeland Records, a symbol of cultural resistance against capitalist approval. That blog – explains Cennamo in the introduction of his book – has become a refuge for passionate readers over the years, “a crossroads of sailors” who find themselves around the cult of the North American narrative. There is also the undersigned among these followers, grateful to have been introduced in a fascinating world, which I attended little. The book, published by Argon Edizioni in the series Electronsis titled as the blog: Telegraph Avenue. American literature itineraries. It is a reasoned vademecum, illustrated with beautiful drawings by Kornel Speranza, an agile and precious tool to orient themselves in the twentieth century and in the first twenty -first literary century of the United States. The short but dense cards are forty. Collected in six thematic sections – from realism to postmodernism, from minimalism to Jewish narrative, to a hypothetical “new canon” – embrace a century of novels, stories and trends, between great classics and surprising contemporary choices.
The strength of this captivating agile volume lies entirely in the point of view. Cennamo does not pretend neutrality. He speaks from a reader involved, at times excited, without giving up precision and rigor (and in this – gamble – probably his forensic profession helps him). Each author is biographically and culturally contextualized: John Fante and his visceral relationship with Italian origins; Raymond Carver and his dry writing, “he specifies more than minimalist”, also thanks to the controversial intervention of the Gordon Lish editor; Richard Yates, forgotten in life and rediscovered only after the cinematographic adaptation of Revolutionary Road. Biographies within biographies, novels inside novels, as there is not a single American author who does not carry an aura behind a little maudit, that I do not bother to bleed in the act of writing. Cennamo dedicates pages illuminated to the “exteriors” to the academic canon: Stephen King, Don Winslow, Percival Everett. These are not populist concessions, but argued choices, justified by a precise idea: that great literature can take many forms, and that the genres – horror, thriller, noir – are not barriers but prospects.
There is room for editorial issues, such as the so -called Sensitive Editingwhich according to Cennamo risks normalizing contemporary writing excessively, and for wider cultural reflections, such as the impact of September 11 on the US narrative. The tone is critical, but never something. The “Woke” culture is problematized, not demonized: “Contemporary fiction is threatened and vilipesa by a new Puritan wave, but is also injured in numbers”, writes with lucidity. Among the most successful pages stand out those on Philip Roth, Don Delillo, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, Louise Erdrich. But the volume is not a mere roundup of well -known names. Cennamo also explores the works of Emma Cline, Raven Leilani, Rebecca Kuang and Tiffany McDaniel with the same care. After all, as he himself confesses, Telegraph Avenue he could have titled My Americans. It is a book written “more with the heart than with the head”, as he declares with frankness, and he feels. A chest of superb masterpieces – on which Trump fortunately did not put the duties – available to the reader.
