What do fairy tales – something very traditional in our culture, passed down for centuries – have to do with Artificial Intelligence? One would say nothing, yet, thanks to an idea by Luigi Barnaba Frigoli, the world of ogres, fairies, trolls and witches can find themselves in dialogue with ChatGpt. It happens in his novel «The Third Grimm», recently published by Rizzoli (310 pages, 17 euros) and of which we publish, on this page, the «Author's Note» which acts as an afterword to the volume. Which, beyond the gimmick, is a story to be read like all the others, indeed, it is many stories: that of Ferdinand Grimm, that of the most famous “two Grimms”, that is, his brothers Jacob and Wilhelm and those discovered by the three tireless German storytellers (and here artificial imagination intervenes…). The topic is suitable: Ferdinand Grimm (1788-1845), fifth son of the exemplary and very Teutonic family, is a character from a dark fairy tale. Marginalized by his loved ones (so to speak) also because of his homosexuality and mistreated above all by the two well-known brothers, also because they found themselves competing on the same, fairy-tale terrain. In the novel, in order to find fairy tales, Ferdinand is willing to visit the hardest and darkest places, where the human soul reaches its abjection, such as the “Mattanza”, which brings together prostitutes, criminals, deformities of the body and the spirit. It is a feat that he must accomplish alone, for two reasons: first, despite having made a pact, his brothers betrayed him, setting out “on their own”; second, Jacob and Wilhelm only listen to the voices of old ladies, wise men, decent people in short, while he wants to discover “bright fairy tales and black legends”. Here's what he reproaches the two older brothers: «The peoples who are hidden from men and who fill the ancient stories that you two take so much pains to search for, survey, interpret as if they were alchemical formulas live… yes! They live! Even in taverns, in smelly alleys, even in brothels!
Peter and Dalia help him, because the hero can never be alone.