Well, I may have lost yesterday’s first episode given my failure to record, but Paul Bond was kind enough to offer an immediate turn around and spend another hour of his day before work talking about Giorgio De Maria’s The Twenty Days of Turin. This version is interesting in that it is a lot more depressing than yesterday’s conversation. Things moved quickly from a book discussion to dark reflections on the state of things globally. It is apropos that Paul should be my first guest on the Monogamous Book Club given we have been doing some version of this about Mario Bava movies or Cormac McCarthy novels for years. Not to mention we have taught a few classes together as well. I’m comfortable with Paul, which makes for some good conversations. That said, this one may have been weighed down a bit by a general sense of fear and dread as the discussion moved towards history and our current geopolitical environment.
I think I’ll be calling on Paul again soon to join me for yet another episode wherein we will discuss Leo Perutz’s Saint Peter’s Snow, which Peter Berard referred to in his review of De Maria’s Twenty Days in the LA Review of Books which started Paul and I down this path many months ago. As for this discussion, well I guess you may just have to listen to us talk about Italian terrorism in the 1970s, Turino, social media miasma, scatological themes of the novel, European nationalism, U.S. racism, and more, well then this is your episode 🙂
