Mirko Tondi, “Nessun Cactus da queste parti”
“He told me that he had a sensational idea in mind, truly a marvel; to tell the truth it didn’t have much to do with Conrad, but he could consider it his personal ascent of the river after a plunge into human madness: a humorous noir novel set in the future. What? But what was he trying to tell me? Maybe he had mixed genres and desecrated Chandler, Hammet, Spillane stuff to make a soup of laughter and vehicles floating in the air? “ (page 110)
If ever there was, in the metanarrative, a self-definition of his own work, this one by Mirko Tondi on his dystopian novel “No cactus in these parts”, is the most shining example. The work is hilarious, very well written, a puzzle of mirrors and references to disassemble and reassemble literary genres, from science fiction to noir.
The protagonist is called Conrad, but his name will come only at the end and will be a name full of literary meanings. By profession he is a detective, just the traditional one with a raincoat, Borsalino and a pistol tucked into the back of his pants. He lives, however, not in the Chicago of the thirties, but in Porto Rens, which is what New Orleans will turn into in the future, a putrid and derelict city, somewhere between Gotham City and Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. In exactly one hundred years from now, climate change will have submerged the lands, wars reshaped the geopolitics of the planet, drugs will have become legal and the underworld will have officially taken the place of politics. The air in Porto Rens is dirty, the Mississippi is an open sewer, people survive, technology has returned to pre-industrial levels.
Everything is seen with a sarcastic and distorting look. Noir and science fiction mix: slums, alcoholic detectives and dark ladies on the one hand, time travel and post-technological realities on the other.
The protagonist investigates a name thief who moves between present (ie future) and past, he is in love with a woman who left him, has no friends and is an alcoholic. Perhaps the most successful part of the book is precisely the representation, realistic and ironic at the same time, of the personality of an alcoholic, his love-hate for the bottle, the effects of alcohol on his body and the struggle to detoxify. In this regard, Gregory David Roberts’ “Shantaram” comes to mind. Beyond that, the rapresentation of the future world is certainly striking, outlined in a fun style but not devoid of historical, geographical, climatic, musical and intellectual…