Cronache dal Sistema
Chronicles from the System. I: Mr Ciccione and Friar Fifteen. A man erased by an Enter key, and a System that cannot process its own error
No operator has ever pressed the "no" option at the edge of the screen, since such an act would have raised his "doubt" score by several points.
The book
It all begins with a fourth-grade temporary clerk at the Registry Office, Deaths Section, who one evening in "Octember" is hot, wants a coffee, and presses Enter. On the other side of the city Mr Ciccione, "Fatso", fifty-five years old, 159 kilos, ham and beer in front of the television, finds the next morning that the eye scanner at the office no longer recognises him after thirty years, that the guard does not know him, that his card is declined at the supermarket, that his mother, over the intercom of her care home, declares she has no children. For the System he is dead, and the System, which counts on the evening news the born, the dead, the born alive and the born dead, has no key to go back.
A supermarket brawl, a cage like the ones at the zoo, a trial in which crimes are paid for in "whole pieces" and crime pays (in the case of a repeat offence, exactly double), two men in balaclavas with no eyeholes: the solution the System finds for the man who does not exist is to give him the identity of a friar who has just died. Ciccione is dropped off in a habit, with a rosary and a suitcase full of cartons of cigarettes, beer, a San Daniele ham and an inflatable doll, in front of a triangular monastery at 2,975 metres, with staircases that go down while going up and doors opening onto the void. He is Friar Fifteen. His brothers, who see a saint where there is a man shouting at the football in his cell, make him their confessor; Friar Two, the abbot, keeps a general's dress uniform under his habit; Friar Twenty-One, once head chef at the restaurant "The Joys of the System", cooks stock-cube soup as penance. And Ciccione, between a roast thrown in the bin and one dream too many, begins to doubt.
The book closes with the postcard the System sends to every citizen on coming of age, with cashier, mechanic, thief, guard, priest or minister written on it, and with a janitor promoted to professor of physics who decides to drive up the mountain to confess. It is the first volume of the Chronicles from the System: dystopian satire in the tradition of Kafka and Orwell, dedicated "to George, Luigi, Franz, Luis-Ferdinand, José, Stefano", but more desperate and funnier, because the protagonist is not a hero; he is an average man who just wants to watch the match. The book is published in Italian only; the quotations below are English renderings, with page numbers from the 2020 Italian edition.
Quotations
Translated from the Italian. Page numbers refer to the 2020 edition.
Even the office heads and the managers of the system he envied were in the same situation, hamsters too, with a bigger wheel.
There is injustice in every smallest corner of life.
Everybody is in their underwear when nobody can see them.
He sank into a sleep with few dreams, as often happens to men without imagination.
He felt like a prisoner sentenced to thirty years in jail, in convenient instalments of eight or ten hours a day.
Joy often has to do with the ending or suspension of a familiar pain, so habitual that we no longer notice it because that is just how it is. And one learns, without noticing, to think that happiness is not a normal state but an exceptional one, an exception to the rule.
He was not evolved enough to make such considerations; not that he was stupid: he was an average man.
He swore, moving nimbly across the whole natural scale and then, beyond the white keys, over the sharps and flats too, with the ease of Rubinstein.
A man who is in prison and has not understood why feels even more alone, and so he tries to cling to someone by talking.
He had stayed fat inside, in his mind. He could not be loved, and he did not want that dry form of love called compassion.
Crime pays. In the case of a repeat offence, exactly double.
The only way to end up in jail was for debt: consequently the only people in prison were society's rejects, the desperate, those who did not intend to pay for their crimes.
He opened the search page of Sistemoogle, where the words "CAREFUL WHAT YOU SEARCH FOR" stood out in large letters.
The result was people who worked as doctors or notaries and would have liked to be fishermen or policemen. Personal inclinations could be cultivated as a pastime, but nothing more: had they been made public they would have destabilised the System.
They waited. They waited. They waited…
Chapters
Fourteen chapters, in the original Italian.
- Prologo
- Ciccione
- In galera
- Il processo
- Il convento
- Il trantran
- Il confessore
- Frate Due
- Frate Ventuno
- Il dubbio
- A cena
- La fuga
- L'occasione
- Il Sistema
Where to read it. In Italian on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) · Goodreads · Apple Books. Italian page: Cronache dal Sistema.
How to cite
The author
Lucio Freni is an independent Italian writer based in Rome. His books span noir, dystopian satire, philosophical grotesque and epistolary fiction, and include Benzina, Il libro del Nulla, Non torna mai nessuno da quaggiù and È tutta colpa di Dio. All titles are published in Italian. Author record on Wikidata.