This is the best summary I could come up with:
They want diaries, people’s deepest, innermost thoughts: “true, authentic documents reflecting the real spirit of the people.” The promise is that the Library will connect lonely souls, bringing them together, letting them make friends.
It is a political allegory — Giorgio de Maria was writing during Italy’s Years of Lead, marked by near-constant terrorist violence.
Though there was violence on both the right and left, the notable emergence of neofascist groups resulted in the biggest body count: a 1985 bombing in Bologna that killed 85 and injured more than 200.
Some of these manuscripts document perverse desires — a grandfather, in his seventies, writes at length of his lust to deflower an 18-year-old, the same age as his grandchildren; a constipated woman in her 40s wants a young man to help her defecate — and some are simple tirades against the publishing industry itself.
The Twenty Days of Turin was originally published in 1977, but it’s impossible not to read about the Library and think of Silicon Valley’s boy wonders creating social media.
Anyone who’s been in an online community for any length of time has witnessed the perversions, meltdowns, bullying, and otherwise bizarre human behavior de Maria imagines in his Library.
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