The 1977 Novel That Predicted Social Media

The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio de Maria

Giorgio de Maria’s The Twenty Days of Turin is, I am told, something of a cult classic in its native Italy. Set in Turin, naturally, it managed to capture the unique city just as it was emerging from the second world war and slipping gruffly into a period of social and political unrest. There is a subtle undercurrent of both relief and tension that weaves through the story in a way I have found to be not uncommon in post-WWII European literature. But, interestingly, these co-threads of relaxation and tension are also, I would say, prevalent in our own modern society.

While de Maria’s timely contribution to the literature of his age is certainly worth noting, what places this book among the prophetic are his extraordinary, almost point-for-point predictions regarding the impending arrival — and devastating consequences — of social media. There is an argument to be made for placing The Twenty Days of Turin on the same shelf as Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm and Huxley’s Brave New World.

Of course, Giorgio de Maria in 1977 could not have foreseen the particulars of the personal computer nor the shape and functionality of the smartphone. But these are incidentals. The core of the thing — the nature of social media itself — was something he saw clearly enough to be able predict everything about it except the specific technology by which it would be implemented. Indeed, it is as though someone from 2025 traveled back to 1977 and, over an espresso in the Piazza San Carlo in the shadow of the bronze horse and his noble rider, he explained in terms a Torinese from the 70s could understand how Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram worked. And Giorgio de Maria, so disturbed, turned the time traveler’s terrible revelation into a work of horror.

The story is simple, though wonderfully Borgesian. It follows a nameless salaryman who, in his free time, is researching a bizarre event that occurred ten years ago called “The Twenty Days of Turin”. He hopes to write a book about the occurrence and so has been going about the city in an effort to collect sources and witnesses who might be willing to talk to him.

I. “The Library”

It doesn’t take very long for the reader to pick up on the repeated and significant mentions of “the Library”. According to every witness — and even our narrator’s understanding — the Library stands somehow at the center of everything that happened. Indeed, after the twenty days’ events had ended the Library had been destroyed. There is even the vague implication that the events might have ended… because the Library had been destroyed.

In the book’s third chapter the reader is finally introduced to the Library. Our investigator-protagonist is granted special permission to view its charred remains by the city’s mayor. Through him we learn how the Library came to be:

Dapper young men — origins unknown — who were very polite, very smartly dressed, very affable, and very tuned-in to the major issues in the world went door to door in the city in pairs of two.

“[The Library] was presented as a good cause, created in the hope of encouraging people to be more open with one another. Its creators were little more than boys: perky, smiling youngsters, well groomed and well dressed, without a trace of facial hair. They looked designed to win people’s trust […] It’s true; it was whispered that dark forces acted behind them…”

They introduced to the citizens of Turin a novel new concept: a “library”, but one that was filled not with the “artifice of literature” but rather:

“‘We’re looking for true, authentic documents reflecting the real spirit of the people, the kinds of things we would rightly call popular subjects…’” (emphasis in the original)

The Library worked like this: regular people — anyone, really — could contribute a “manuscript”. This could be anything: some offered old photos, some offered books of poetry or recipes, some dug out diaries from their youth. Most often, however, Library users simply wrote something which they intended specifically for inclusion in the Library. Almost all of these contributions were confessional in nature.

Upon approval these manuscripts were then shelved in the Library under a kind of code name. Anyone could enter the Library, browse these manuscripts, read whatever he or she liked, and then, if desired, inquire at the front desk for the contact information of the author of a given title. The Library clerks would then put the reader and the writer into contact with one another creating, they claimed, friendship connections.

It should be noted, all of this cost the users a small fee. There was a small fee for having one’s manuscript included in the Library, a small fee for admittance, and a small fee for obtaining a writer’s contact information. The money, users were told, was intended for charitable purposes, specifically for the care of patients at the insane asylum in whose basement the Library was being housed.

(Yes. The original Library was located in a sanatorium’s basement.)

Anyone who lives in our social media-infested world does not need to be told just how infectiously popular this Library became.

“The pen could scribble freely whatever the spirit dictated. And once it started, it was hard to stop!”

Countless contributors emerged almost overnight. The idea of being read, of being seen was so tantalizing to every person in Turin that even the least literarily inclined began to dredge up their deepest, most personal selves in order to fill a manuscript that could be placed upon the shelves of the Library. Because having one’s manuscript on the shelves of the Library meant that someone might read it. And if someone read it, they might then reach out…

“The prospect of ‘being read’ quivered in the distance like an enchanting mirage— a mirage as real, nonetheless, as the ‘realities’ that were written down. I will give myself to you, you will give yourself to me…” (emphasis in the original)

There weren’t many of these manuscripts left for our investigating narrator to read. He found one in which a middle-aged woman detailed at great length certain medical difficulties she had encountered in recent years. One described the daily life of a very ordinary, respected man who had developed an obsessive habit of writing absolute nonsense on hundreds of papers scattered throughout his house, all of which he kept cataloged with his photographic memory. If even one paper was moved, he would fly into hysterics. One slightly more disturbing manuscript had been written by a seventy-year-old man expressing his infatuation with a local eighteen-year-old girl. His writing detailed the various services he wished to offer her, if she was willing.

“The range was infinite: it had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.”

In the course of his investigation, our narrator began to notice an overlapping theme. Towards the end of most of the manuscripts — which had begun with the energizing enthusiasm of connecting with another person — the writer began to describe a growing feeling of hollowness. Many even began to use the same motif: a dried up lake which haunted their restless dreams.

The pattern of hollowing stood at the center of the so-called Twenty Days. As more and more users made repeated contributions to the Library — in an effort to staunch the spiritual bleeding, so to speak — this hollowed, emptied feeling only worsened. In time the hollowness gave way to fitful insomnia. Before long nearly the entirety of the city of Turin was plagued with an epidemic of insomnia. Soon thereafter insomnia became a kind of somnambulism. People from all across the city would climb into bed every night, toss and turn for a time, and then — almost as a coordinated mass — get up and file calmly into the streets in great, silent crowds.

For twenty days this continued. And almost every night some mysterious force would brutally murder two or three of these sleepwalkers, usually by bludgeoning them to death. The identity of this murderous force is the central mystery of the novel, so I won’t give it away here.

II. The Psychosis

Our narrator spent most of the middle of the story trying to escape the spiritual and psychological event horizon of the Library. Even with his investigation limited to the periphery, it still seemed to have infected his mind with a hint of that hollowing depression and insomnia. He began to rely on sleeping pills; even still his dreaming mind was beset by images of a dried lake…

It didn’t take long for his investigation to reveal that the Library had re-emerged — if it had ever been gone at all. Its existence was less organized now; it had abandoned even the facade of order and dignity. Gone were the tidy shelves and the helpful clerks, there were no cataloging systems and certainly no payments made for friend connections. Contributors literally left their manuscripts in the trash, or sometimes in the gutter, or under a bush. Other users were easy to spot: they were the ones rifling through trash cans like vagrants, but with a certain look in their eyes.

At one point our increasingly disturbed protagonist became victim to obsessive, random correspondence from an anonymous individual. Eventually, for reasons having to do mainly with his own growing sense of isolation and despair in the midst of his investigation, and against his better judgment, he replied to the strange letters. He viewed this act as adjacent, somehow, to using the Library, and immediately regretted it, yet continued the correspondence. For weeks he received letter after letter from this bizarre individual detailing his Kafka-esque living arrangements in a way that was equal parts polite and threatening. Our protagonist’s only friend in the city had an interesting observation to make about this distressing pen pal:

“I think [the letters] might’ve been a lure, an attempt to snare your subconscious mind and reduce it to passivity. Whoever wrote them knew his addressee very well, weaknesses and all… Too many things about us are already on record.”

After attempting to cut off communication, he received yet another letter via his displeased boss. This he crumpled and threw into a trash can on the street, aware as he did so that this would be taken as a contribution to the new iteration of the Library. Indeed, picking up some random bit of written trash and then tossing it into another trash can served almost the exact same function as “re-tweeting” (re-trashing?) or whatever else it might be called. Especially if one added a few notes to the pages before tossing them.

A keen observation made rather obliquely in the course of the second half of the story was that prolonged interaction with the mechanics of the Library gradually drove one insane. This was somehow different from the emptiness and the insomnia, though it was likely a comorbidity. This insanity was particularly dehumanizing. As their usage of the Library continued, users became less and less human. Their behavior became unpredictable, even dangerous. There was a perverse, subtle (and compounding) psychosis that settled like tepid water into the hollowed-out lake bed inside each and every one of them. Even our protagonist felt a shade of this, especially when he made his contribution.

Alongside this growing madness, there was also an observable decrease in everything else. The citizens of Turin possessed an alarming lack of concern for the derangement that was building within and around them.

There was, indeed, a mystery at the heart of all this. Who controlled the Library and what did they get out of it? What, precisely, had caused the deaths during the Twenty Days? All those who managed to brush up against the answers to these questions found their lives threatened by mysterious forces. Even our narrator was repeatedly warned off. In any event, it was clear that there was nothing about the Library that benefited its users. But the Library, nevertheless, benefited someone.

After the initial Library was destroyed, the second iteration showed that the entire process had become inescapably addictive. After a “contribution” was “deposited” another person would fall upon the trash can as if he had just watched someone drop a diamond ring inside.

Many have remarked that Giorgio de Maria’s predictions regarding our disconnected, isolated modern age are chilling in their pointed accuracy. Perhaps even more chilling, however, is how well he predicted the artificial means by which society would try to fill that void of loneliness and isolation. And also the catastrophic outcome of those artificial remedies.

It seemed, too, that de Maria had intuited that powerful forces, who were focused solely on their own ends, would nurture society’s dependence on this poisonous artificial “social connection”. Promising relief from isolation they would offer a solution that would do nothing but exacerbate the problem. And then they would encourage continued use as the only remedy. All the while they would remain in the background, draining an addicted population too sedated by their own emptiness to realize — or care — what was happening. This population could then be effortlessly controlled.

Indeed, there were passages in The Twenty Days of Turin that made my jaw drop in much the same way Brave New World or 1984 have done in the past.

It’s difficult — and, to my mind, almost irrelevant — to speak of this book as a literary work. The prose is simple, but good. The story events are well-structured, the setting atmospheric, though thinly drawn. We never get a chance to know our narrator particularly well. The story’s ending is abrupt and even a little unsatisfying. But what solution could there possibly be? Have any of us solved the problem that is social media? Indeed, the ending of The Twenty Days of Turin might be a critical piece of the prophecy.

Have you not seen the sleepwalking masses processing through their emptied lives? Have you not heard the smiling, clean-shaven, sharply dressed young men tell you how this was going to make your life so much richer? (Have you not sensed the powerful forces behind them?)

Have you not also dreamt of the dried up lake bed? Would you not rather wake up?

If you’d like, you can pre-order a paperback copy of this book from bookshop.com using my affiliate link. It will be released in October of this year.