Gianfranco De Turris and Sebastiano Fusco, a couple consolidated in the panorama of studies on the fantastic and on HP Lovecraft, return to confront the famous author of Providence, taking up a job from 1979 and enriching it with new chapters and unpublished essays.
The volume HP Lovecraft. Poet of the abyss (Bietti, p. 310) This time, this time, not only as an exhaustive manual, full of information of all kinds, suitable for readings of different intensity, and therefore with a narrative that includes biographical details and curious anecdotes, but also as an in -depth analysis of the entire work. In fact, she explores the literary, philosophical and esoteric connections of its production, without neglecting a critical and attentive look at the vast secondary literature and the editorial contexts that have contributed to the more or less positive decompositions of the texts.
When Lovecraft made his debut in Italy in the 1930s, he was little known by the general public. The cultural context influenced not only the quality of the translations, but the same editions, often compromised by cuts and reviews which, instead of improving the texts, ended up altering their meaning. And this situation forgiven for many years. Starting from this observation, De Turris and Fusco first decide to face the so -called “Lovecraft question”, shedding light on the editorial operations of the past years, including for example the revision edited by Fruttero and Lucentini for their anthology of 1962, which even came to simplify and significantly modify the works of the master of the horror. And then, secondly, exploring all the intellectual landscape that moved around the work Lovecraftiana, providing names and details on publishers and translators alternating over time and which, in the genuine attempt to spread its work, often often did so without a full awareness of philological complexity and content.
De Turris and Fusco obviously do not limit themselves to an analysis of editorial dynamics. In fact, they offer a thorough reflection on the evolution of Lovecraft’s thought and writing. They examine his youth, his poetic experience, the wide epistolary, his philosophical theories and the vast mythology that gave birth to an entire narrative universe. In this context, the authors propose a vision that not only pays homage to Lovecraft – which, while dying in 1937 without reaching the fame it would then have conquered, is now recognized as one of the pillars of the fantastic literature of the twentieth century – but finally places it in the place it deserves.
Particularly interesting is the thesis concerning the relationship between the writer’s thought and the concept of “culture of the crisis”. According to the two authors, for a full understanding of the contemporary condition, it is essential to refer to three thinkers who have explored the fantastic in a deeply original way: Jorge Luis Borges, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and, of course, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. And maybe they are right! Lovecraft, in particular, is configured as an essential point of reference for those who want to access the “prison keys” of reality, undertaking a journey that takes place in the interior of the human soul still rhyme to decrypt all the deficits of the modern and the age of materialism. A journey that therefore leads to an abyss that is not simply an escape in the imagination, but a conscious descent into the underworld of our unconscious. For Lovecraft, in fact, the dream is not a simple act of evasion, but a way to confront its deepest fears, bringing them to light and, in some way, making them controllable and not spaceable.
In the volume the evolution of the work of Lovecraft is highlighted, which passes from its initial approach to writing, often influenced by self -taught formation, up to the last and more complex labors, in which the cosmic vision of evil and indifference of the universe become increasingly pregnant. In fact, what emerges is his constant reflection on the fate of man, imprisoned in a reality that seems to escape him and that must be included and not only defined in his terrifying frame. Here is the crucial junction: the horror does not come only from the external world, but also by the individual himself, that is, from the acceptance and awareness of his condition of being finished and vulnerable. The monster thus becomes the representation of these inner forces, of the ancestral fears to which man cannot escape, if not through art, fantasy and a poetic vision. In this perspective, to make themselves bearers of a resistance against the forces of the massification and the trivialization of life can only be, precisely, the esthete, the dreamer and the artist.
The volume of De Turris and Fusco, therefore, not only offers a detailed overview of the work, but provides critical tools to interpret his legacy in the context of modern culture. The Lovecraftian vision, in fact, has never been so current precisely because it remains as an invitation to discover, through horror, the possibility of a new form of awareness, in which evil and the monster are not to be feared, but to be understood as signs of a self -awareness that can precede change.