Levels of reality,and of verisimilitude,in Malerba's Il pianeta azzurro

Abstract

Malerba's Il pianeta azzurro is a rich text with a strong ethical and political message. One of its three narrating voices, L’autore, is a sort of Everyman, a synecdoche for the writer and his readers. By attributing to L’autore well-known aspects of his own private life, Malerba involves himself personally in the text, taking responsibility for its message and partial responsibility for the degradation that during his lifetime overtook Italian life, politics, and its natural landscape. All narrating voices write in the first person, using a technique, the ‘exterior monologue,’ designed to cause readers to identify with each of them. Identification is intensified when one of the voices steals the identities of the other two (and, by extension, Malerba's and the reader's). The unfolding of the novel's complex plot is informed by the non-chronological subjectivity of mnesic time. Therefore, it is grounded in reality, but makes no pretense of objectivity. Indeed, the ‘verisimilar’ plot is more ‘real’ than the implausible reality it recounts.