Title: The disturbing
Author: Giuseppe Imbrogno
Published: October 2017 by Authors Meeting
Genre: Thriller Necklace: Long noses
Size: Broach Pages: 149
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There is nothing that is secret, nothing that cannot be extracted and known about your life, my life, the lives of all, nothing that with a little patience and persistence you can not get to own ".
Enrolment in the gym, a trip abroad, the end of a relationship: every single action generates information. Information that is collected, processed, stored and then sold.
Lorenzo knows, it is his work. On the contrary, much more.
Reviewer rating:
four-stars
Lorenzo is from Milan, single, no longer very young. Professional data analyst, you earn from living by storing information that people, more or less consciously, leave behind you. Every day Lorenzo arrives at the office, starts the laptop and, with the coldness of a surgeon, begins to slip into the lives of perfect strangers. Save profile photos used in social media, collect behavioral patterns, reduce stories to folders on your desktop. All these data are the gold that is sold to other companies, both to support advertising campaigns and to support the development of new products.
People are mere packets of information and, inevitably, Lorenzo brings with him this way of translating reality out of work. Look at the buying experiences of a family at the shopping mall, follow like a detective an elderly at the supermarket, spend entire evenings rumbling among friends' Facebook profiles. His social life is reduced to a minimum and Lorenzo finds himself completely swallowed up by the world of information. His dependence on data analysis explodes when, at a birthday party, the man knows Sergio, businessman successful and enjoyable. Only a few words and Lorenzo opens the doors of obsession: from that moment on Sergio begins to follow Sergio, not only on the web but also in real life, becoming a sort of silent stalker. The data analyst is not limited to collecting the traces left by its object of observation, but ends with completely immedesimizing itself in his life, trying to replicate it in his own life. Change the diet to match that of Sergio. He enrolled in the same gym as Sergio. Choose the same hotel that Sergio frequented for a weekend at the lake.
Information after information, the psychological thriller of Imbrogno keeps the reader glued to the pages, and then amazes him with an unpredictable ending. Also for a data analyst.
Deepening
For his work, Giuseppe Imbrogno chose the same title that Freud associated with an essay in 1919: Il Perturbante. This term is rather complex and relates to a feeling of anxiety that arises with respect to both familiar and foreign dimensions. The parallelism immediately reveals how much the pages written by Imbrogno not only tell a story, but invite the reader to reflect.
The Perturbant is a well-written thriller, capable of arousing a constant sense of curiosity, without ever touching the traits of tension. A sort of slow anguish. An anguish that creates dependence and keeps there, glued together, until the end of the story told by Lorenzo.
The book caricaturizes modern society, made up of people who feel the urgency of talking about themselves, always and in any case, and of companies who, on the other hand, use this information to calibrate marketing campaigns. All these data are mines ready to explode and Imbrogno, with the story of his Lorenzo, emphasizes it loudly.
A protagonist who is impossible to become fond of.
A constant sense of unease.
A growing curiosity.
A writing style that creates dependency.
So what to say, then?
The Perturbant is to be read.
Point.