Fineschi's prose, light and shrewd as if to simulate a narrator who speaks in a low voice, engages this time with a magnetic medieval story with dark outlines, between hell and holiness, suspended between Gothic angularity and learned philosophical dissertations.
The plot flows smoothly in the service of the author and his anxiety to face and analyze the relationship of man with the perception of himself and his image, but soon the investigation goes further, identifying in the contrast between normality and deformity a secret passage to wonder about the conflict between inner worlds disputed between light and darkness, sin and redemption, witchcraft and holiness.
In this context, the philosophy and Christian thought from Augustine to Thomas make up the flame with which Fineschi guides the reader along the narrow and dark path dotted with prejudices, superstitions and witchcraft of a Middle Ages of the soul, sliding with apparent lightness towards a possible solution to the mystery that upsets the existence of the protagonists.
That then such a solution exists or remains suspended, by reason or reason of faith, is not really important. What matters is the human questioning about the events of life and its mysteries, about our imperfections and our mirroring ourselves in them, but above all on that line between good and evil, between devil and holiness, which is not always so clear and intelligible.
In this respect, Fineschi is skilled in recalling quotes and suggestions, from Umberto Eco to Giovanni Testori, in an intellectual game that is pleasant and serene but not too much. There is in fact, in his analysis in the world of the monstrous and the distorted, a sort of counterpoint that takes on when the anguished tones of rock culture rather than the luminous and rational ones of Eco or, again, those imbued with the cynical symbolisms of Cipri 'and Maresco: it is the anxiety of confrontation with a modern world in which pietas and the ability to include the weak and the deformed as human beings (and not products of the evil one) collides with the useless eugenic vainglory of a ethics with ephemeral and distorted values.
And in the end it is precisely this anti-classical and politely iconoclastic vein, which pushes the author to bring to the fore the deformity as in certain videos of the Cure or the Sex Pistols rather than in the sermons of Don Gnocchi, to give us the synthesis of the poetics by Fineschi, certainly animated by a constant reminder of the need for faith, but also by the desire to give voice to a protagonist who is certainly the deformed brother of Brother William of Baskerville, but he is also the perfect antithesis: so much is granite and authoritative the one, so fragile and lost the other, unable to fully combat the distorted relationship with one's physicality.
Stefano Del Giudice