The competitive world of the media- and market-driven culture of the late 20th century thrived on self-promotion, provocation, “discoveries,” and “revelations.” Publishers and their talent scouts were eager to add “new voices.” The Sardinian Salvatore Satta, for example, was a professor of law whose considerable literary production—his best-known novel is Il giorno del giudizio (1979; The Day of Judgement)—was not revealed until after his death. Meanwhile, Stefano D’Arrigo was being supported by publisher Arnoldo Mondadori to compose his ambitious modern epic, Horcynus Orca (1975), 20 years in the making, which narrates the 1943 homecoming through the Strait of Messina (site of the mythical Scylla and Charybdis) of a Sicilian fisherman to an ogre-plagued Sicily. The whole narrative is couched in a language that combines precious hyperliterary Italian, Sicilian dialect, and nonce words à la James Joyce.

The case of Gesualdo Bufalino is not dissimilar to that of Satta. Bufalino’s first novel, Diceria dell’untore (1981; The Plague-Sower), which he published after a lifelong career in teaching, won the 1981 Campiello Prize for fiction awarded by the industrialists of the Veneto region. He went on to publish several other novels. Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio (1976; The Smile of the Unknown Mariner) consolidated the reputation of Vincenzo Consolo, who has been compared to authors as different as fellow Sicilian Leonardo Sciascia (for his rational lucidity) and Carlo Emilio Gadda (for his stylistic experiments).

A truly postmodern phenomenon is that of Umberto Eco, a University of Bologna professor, philosopher, and semiotician who progressed from analyzing genres and deconstructing texts composed by others to synthesizing and constructing his own. His medieval detective story Il nome della rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose), which was widely translated and also made into a movie (1986), has probably been read by more willing readers than Dante’s The Divine Comedy. It no doubt tickled Eco’s lively sense of humour that the film version of his book starred Sean Connery, an actor identified with the role of James Bond, a fictional character on whom Eco had written one of his more famous semiological essays. Eco’s later novels include Baudolino (2000; Eng. trans. Baudolino) and La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (2004; The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana). Eco’s nearest literary heirs are four former students of the University of Bologna who wrote under the collective pseudonym Luther Blissett. Their novel Q (1999; Eng. trans. Q) narrates the clash between Roman Catholic and Protestant religious extremists (and opportunists) in 16th-century Reformation Europe.

Among younger voices, two extremely professional authors—cosmopolitan minimalist Andrea De Carlo and painstaking observer and stylist Daniele Del Giudice—were “discovered” in the early 1980s by Italo Calvino. In novels such as Macno (1984; Eng. trans. Macno) and Yucatan (1986; Eng. trans. Yucatan), De Carlo, a cinematographic recorder of surfaces, deliberately created and manipulated characters without depth, while Del Giudice, in Lo stadio di Wimbledon (1983; “Wimbledon Stadium”), Atlante occidentale (1985; Lines of Light), and Staccando l’ombra da terra (1994; Takeoff: The Pilot’s Lore), described speculative intellectual encounters against a background of hyperrealistically observed technology.

Other successes include the hilarious comic novels of Stefano Benni and of AIDS-generation author Pier Vittorio Tondelli, who burst upon the literary scene with the “on the road” stories of Altri libertini (1980; “Other Libertines”). Tondelli’s demotic language and characters caused the book to be briefly banned. His career culminated with the reflections on grief, sickness, and death of Camere separate (1989; Separate Rooms). Also notable are the short stories and short novels of Antonio Tabucchi—for example, Notturno indiano (1984; Indian Nocturne) and Piccoli equivoci senza importanza (1985; Little Misunderstandings of No Importance). His Sostiene Pereira (1994; Pereira Declares: A Testimony) is the story of the 1938 crisis of conscience of a Lisbon journalist under the regime of António Oliviera de Salazar. Conscientiously constructed are Roberto Pazzi’s pseudo-historical novels Cercando l’imperatore (1985; Searching for the Emperor) and La principessa e il drago (1986; The Princess and the Dragon).

One of the funniest, if not the most tasteful, of the younger writers of the last decades of the 20th century was the outrageous Aldo Busi, author of Seminario sulla gioventù (1984; Seminar on Youth) and the pertly titled Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant (1985; Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman). Two of the most disinterested and earnestly reflective of the younger writers were Sebastiano Vassalli and especially Gianni Celati. Vassalli gradually distanced himself from the more radical experimentalism of Gruppo 63 so as to better exploit his gift for storytelling. La notte della cometa (1984; The Night of the Comet) is a fictionalized biography of the early 20th-century Orphic poet Dino Campana, while in the Strega Prize-winning La chimera (1990; The Chimera), perhaps taking a cue from historian Carlo Ginzburg as well as from Alessandro Manzoni, he reconstructs a 17th-century witch trial. Celati’s early works paradoxically (for a writer so concerned with orality) took as their model the silent-film comedies of Buster Keaton, though in the minimalist stories of Narratori delle pianure (1985; Voices from the Plains) and Quattro novelle sulle apparenze (1987; Appearances) and in his later melancholic, evocative nonfiction Celati strikes a more pensive, lyrical note. The work of antic surrealists Ermanno Cavazzoni and Daniele Benati, who collaborated with Celati on the periodical Il semplice, combines Keaton, Franz Kafka, and echoes of the fantastic world of the romances of Ariosto and Matteo Boiardo and the macaronic parodies written by Teofilo Folengo. Fellini’s last film, La voce della luna (1990; The Voice of the Moon), was inspired by the picaresque Il poema dei lunatici (1987; “The Poems of the Lunatics”) of Cavazzoni. (As if to underline the predominance of visual media over the written word, the title of the novel’s English translation is that of the movie version.) In the 21st century Benati would go on to write the novel Cani dell’inferno (2004; “Hounds of Hell”), set in a mysterious American city that doubles as the Netherworld and is inhabited by a series of deported Italians, all of whose names happen to begin with the letter P.

With the late 20th century’s global questioning of the literary canon and of inherited literary prejudices came a realignment of genres. Previously marginal genres such as the giallo (literally, “thrilling”)—detective fiction—moved to centre stage. Crime, seen from the point of view of the perpetrator, the victim, the avenger, or the investigator, formed the backbone of much Italian narrative at the turn of the 21st century. So popular was the formerly spurned giallo that many “serious” authors began to adapt its mechanisms to their heuristic purposes. Delitti di carta (“Paper Crimes”), an important literary periodical devoted wholly to the detective story, was founded in 1998. An English and American invention, the genre was, however, not without its classical Italian practitioners. But the distinction made by Graham Greene between his “novels” and his “entertainments” reflected the general view in Italy that the thriller belonged to a minor genre. The movie Pulp Fiction (1994) by American director Quentin Tarantino provided a conspicuous rallying point for a surprisingly large group of antiestablishment writers, though it cannot be said to have sparked the formation of this group; among Tarantino’s own influences was classic Italian horror film director Dario Argento. Generically referred to as pulpisti, these writers preferred to be known as the Giovani Cannibali (“Young Cannibals”), a name borrowed from the title of a collection of stories edited by Daniele Brolli (1996). The volumes of abstract theorization subsequently produced by defenders of the new style often reflected the fact that in Italian the loanword pulp does not bring with it the English connotations of the facile, shoddy, and cheap potboiler.

Among the authors who made their debut in the stylized, blood-splattered, sadomasochistic world of the Cannibali—several of whom later curbed their early excesses (without, one hopes, compromising their principles) for the tamer successes of the market—are Niccolò Ammaniti, Tiziano Scarpa, Isabella Santacroce, Aldo Nove (pseudonym of Antonello Satta Centanin), Simona Vinci, Daniele Luttazzi, Silvia Ballestra, Luisa Brancaccio, Francesca Mazzucato, Matteo Galiazzo, and Carlo Lucarelli. Ammaniti’s Io non ho paura (2001, film 2003; I’m Not Scared) chronicles a young boy’s loss of innocence after he encounters the brutality of the adult world. No evidence of innocence exists in the microcosm described by Simona Vinci. Her Dei bambini non si sa niente (1997; Eng. trans. What We Don’t Know About Children, or A Game We Play) opens a disturbing window onto the perverse and ultimately deadly private world of a group of children abandoned by their families to their own devices. Carlo Lucarelli’s thriller Almost Blue (1997; the original and the English translation carried the same English-language title) was made into a film by Alex Infascelli in 2000. Its soundtrack—the music of Miles Davis, Chet Baker, and Coleman Hawkins—was already implicit in the book’s title. The novel is set in Bologna, where police inspector Grazia Negro tracks a serial murderer who, chameleon-like, takes on the characteristics of his victims. She is aided in her investigation by the blind Simone Martini (his name is that of an early Italian painter) who with his ham radio is able to tune into the frequencies of the killer’s thoughts.