Diario di un gatto con gli stivali (review)

The "Diary of a Puss in Boots" is the latest, only partially successful play by an Italian author using story elements from fairy tales and popular romance. Roberto Vecchioni, born in 1943 in Milan, is known to the Italian public as a cantautore, a writer and singer of songs (canzoni) musically arranged and performed by himself. His canzoni d'autore are first and foremost engagements with the complicated—and frequently dramatic—political, social, and cultural history of Italy since the 1970s; on the one hand close to genuine folksongs, the study of which was reinvigorated in this period by intellectuals and anthropologists, they are, on the other hand, related to the commercial canzoni showcased in particular by the Sanremo Festival. Both narrative types have seismically registered and accompanied the ongoing changes of the Italian way of life. Thus, Vecchioni is part of a small group of scholarly cantautori whose lyrics often interweave literary quotations, making the texts at their best (as with Fabrizio de André) genuine poetry, or literature, respectively.

Educated in the classics and then teaching Greek and Latin at various schools in Milan, Vecchioni began his literary career in 1983 with a Milan publishing house. Since 1996 his works have been edited by Einaudi, the prominent Turin publisher that has also produced his latest book. Emerging in connection with his musical work, the latter contains, on the one hand, fifteen stories or tales that are partly rewritings of well-known fairy stories, and, on the other, an extended spy or detective story about the death of Cinderella. Five of the fifteen fairy texts were published in 2005 on a CD, together with a booklet (Il contastorie [The (fairy-)tale teller]). He has recited them live in concert as a frame to his songs.

In the prologue Vecchioni expounds his literary ambitions, which he then, however, only partially fulfills: in re-creating and rewriting the fairy tales, he attempts to question these well-known stories in order to foreground that since every tale supposedly always includes its opposite, "Nothing appears as it is" (3). This also makes for the title of the first story from the first section, which together with the last story (with a slightly altered title) forms a kind of frame. In "Niente è come appare" ("Nothing is what it appears to be") the main character is a fairy-tale teller, appearing one winter afternoon in the light cone of a streetlamp—just like a singer on the stage of a darkened theater; soon gathering around him is a group of children who have been playing outside and are eager to hear his tales. These, however, do not always speak the truth, as the protagonist affirms, because the first one to recount the tales told them as he thought best, and no one since had dared to alter them (8). To confirm this claim, he retells the story of Little Red Riding Hood (adapting the Grimms' version). He changes its logic in order to account for animal-rights activists, environmentalists, and dramatic daily-news coverage (cronaca nera). "Who really killed the grandmother?" Vecchioni's storyteller asks. No longer the wolf, a docile animal possessing riches and here made out to be the victim of a tyrannical, attention-seeking girl always dressed in red. Together with her friend, a hunter (a poacher), she plans to kill the grandmother and blame the murder on the wolf, hence killing two birds with one stone: to gain the wolf's riches as well as the inheritance of the old woman, who is represented as miserly.

The narrator explicitly omits how the children responded to the new version of the fairy tale. Their not participating in the next round of storytelling, however—as the final story reveals ("Niente appare com'è" ["Nothing appears the way it is"])—is a clear indication of their skepticism toward such experiments. This might be attributed in part also to the narrator's physical appearance. With his coat collar open and hood pulled down...