I Convitati di Pietra
by Michele Mari
I like to believe that I keep myself well up to date with contemporary Italian literature. Evidently, however, this is not quite the case, since I first heard of Michele Mari relatively recently, in 2024, after the publication by “And Other Stories” of Brian Robert Moore’s English translation of the 2007 novel Verderame (Verdigris). This is still on my TBR list, but I recently read Mari’s latest novel, I Convitati di Pietra (“The Stone Guests”). This work won its author the prestigious Premio Strega for 2026, albeit not without a strong dose of controversy. Even Mari’s fans seem to agree that this is not his best novel or, at least, not typical of his style, and that the Strega prize was probably awarded more in recognition of Mari’s long career than for this specific book. Others argued that there were more deserving books on the shortlist, with the fourth-placed Lo Sbilico by Alcide Pierantozzi gaining some strong online support.
To spice things up further, just days before the award, Mari was drawn into a scandal based on offensive comments made privately, while on tour with other Strega finalists, about the late writer and activist Michela Murgia (whose Accabadora, incidentally, is also on my TBR list...). The comments – suggesting that Murgia’s anger was based on dissatisfaction with her looks – were, at best, injudicious and, at worst, sexist and misogynistic, and led to calls for his exclusion from the shortlist. No exclusion followed and, as had long been expected, Mari won the coveted prize.
Controversies aside, I had no qualms about reading the novel and I do not regret doing so, even though I am now curious about Mari’s other works and how they differ from this one. I Convitati di Pietra is, in effect, based on a very simple and almost banal premise, which sets a literary machine in motion and follows it obsessively through to its natural conclusion. In brief, the novel tells of ex-students of Class IIIA at a secondary school in Milan who set up a rather morbid lottery or game. The group decide to invest a sum of money and to meet every year until the number of surviving members of their group dwindles to three, who would then share the prize money. The novel follows the group over the decades, their lives seemingly shackled by the raffle they have set up.
The result is a danse macabre of a novel, a book in which the shadow of death is ever present. Despite the dark subject matter, the novel is driven forward by an underlying sense of cynical humour – one can almost sense the author having fun with his characters (and their lives) as he snuffs them out one by one.
I Convitati di Pietra is not perfect. As a natural consequence of the basic premise of the novel, there is a strong element of repetition and, particularly at the beginning, it does sometimes read like a bland list of details about the characters. Some of the running jokes (for instance, Brodo’s fixation with pornography and masturbation) wear thin. The asides (including ample details about films featuring Gene Hackman) add an element of whimsy to the book, but can also feel digressive.
At its best, however, the novel offers a meditation on
death, illness and old age, shot through with dark humour. The final pages turn
out to be unexpectedly tender and poignant – almost verging on a sentimentality
that seems inconsistent with Mari’s public image as a grey, unsmiling
intellectual. I Convitati di Pietra might not be a masterpiece, but one
should not dismiss it lightly.
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