The Fabulous Domingo
Everything is irregular in Domingo. His face, “structured on triangles, protrusions, sloping shadows”; his crooked way of walking, like a fox; his forty years, long and tight like his profile. He is an important figure of protest and disobedience. He is the last human being to refuse to adapt himself to the world. He lives on inventions, cabals and perfect trickiness. He is the king of pìcaros, manwhores and liars, a lonely and original thief, a con artist. He has an eternal and angelic girlfriend who has a truck and works behind the candy counter, near the darts stall and the roller-coaster.
Domingo is different respect other people: he feels the glassy air through which he moves; his sufferance is the face of the world that falls apart. Until, one day, a spine rips “the musty shell of his heart” and makes him play with his destiny using a roll of the dice: he kidnaps a young gipsy girl, who was born with her heart displaced. Her skin is lightly blue, like the color of a candle burning out. Her lips are like blackberries and her smile like the wing of a swallow. The hours that Domingo passed with her give him back the abyss of life and the adventure that he never gave up, moving among knives, premonitions and pursuits, in an overnight luciferin Turin, which recalls the surreal Paris of Boris Vian or the Moscow of Bulgakov.
With a language that is irregular and fanciful as much as his character, Giovanni Arpino pays his best tribute to the fantasy genre and creates a mysterious tale like a map of the signs carved on a hand.
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