Who knows if the country of beets and liars will come to know, that Stefano Benni is dead. Or will they think is a castroneria too? Let’s hope! It is true that everything can happen in that bar under the sea … but this story, alasthis time, is bitterly true.
78 years old, one of the Italian writers who most knew how to permeate his stories of narrative and linguistic inventions, pure fantasy, he, Stefano Benniwent away and left us like this, as “Arturo perplexed in front of the abandoned house on the sea“.
Bolognese, with roots firm between the woods and rinds of the Monzuno Apennines, Benni was, especially for the gen X, a literary compass: sharp laughter, surreal waste, thin melancholy, language inventions. Reality, in his books, became urban fairy tale capable of scratching.
Born in 1947, Benni is not just novels and stories. Of course, the classics are all there – “”Sport bar“,”Eliant“,”The Celestini Company“,”Scared comedians warriors“,”The bar under the sea” – But there is also work for theater, TV and newspapers. Among the signatures, the collaboration with heart stands out, the satirical insert of the unit directed by Michele Serra: a laboratory of civil irony that marked an era.
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Cinema also brings its imprint. In 1987 he signed the script of “Topo Galileo“(Directed by Felice Laudadio), which brings Beppe Grillo to the big screen. In 2011 he co-writing”Sport bar“, Transposition of his best seller. In the middle, in 1989, there is the oblique jewel”Music for old animals“(With Umberto Angelucci): a surreal drift in a dystopian metropolis, with Dario Fo professor on the run, Paolo Rossi Mechanical Kung-Fu, a blossoming girl (Viola Simoncioni) and the threatening shadow of Eros Pagni on the heels.
If you have never read something Benni, start from “Bar Sport” for bitter rice or from “Elianto” to fly high without detaching his feet from the ground. It is here, above all, that Stefano Benni recalled a simple thing: the stories, when they are good, make community. And the communities – like the territories – also cure like this, with words that keep together irony, memory and future.
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