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This Finché la vittima non sarà nostra by the Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos is a book of extreme difficulty. Constantly poised between myth and allegory, deliberately cryptic and disorienting, it resists placement within any precise category. It is certainly not a novel, nor a collection of short stories, since there is no plot or narrative arc. Nor is it a philosophical treatise, lacking an argumentative path, a triptych of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, or even simple speculation. It is, however, an illustration—through small tableaux—of the many facets of violence, both human and, more broadly, permeating the entire world. It is a reflection on how humanity has attempted to take control of this violence in order to tame it, on its successes and its failures.
The book is structured in short chapters, each marked by a letter of the alphabet. In each one there is a different scene, described through suggestion and without any literal foothold to guide the reader, who in fact enters them like a traveler stepping into a dark cave, forced to grope their way forward. In more than one interview, Lyacos has stated that the work was deliberately released without any subtext, without points of reference, without contexts. The result is a cryptic message, not universally accessible. If literature is (also) communication, Lyacos deliberately undermines this aspect, while at the same time insisting that there is indeed a content: his reflection on violence as an archetype.
This raises the question of how these two things can be held together, given that communication—even literary communication—presupposes a sender, a receiver, and a medium capable of connecting the two shores. In this case, the medium is a fragile bridge on which the reader feels unsteady. Unless one chooses to abandon oneself to the mere sound of words, to the visceral emotion evoked by the stream of consciousness, what remains of the reading experience is a sense of incompleteness and even frustration.Original in italian
