Crunco

Mauro Colarieti’s Crunco follows Enea Cruncotti, nicknamed Crunco, a twenty-two-year-old gay man trapped in the fictional provincial town of Lezzago in the Bergamo lowlands, where he works in his father’s butcher shop after abandoning university and watches his former ambitions rot alongside the carcasses he cuts up every day. The novel begins with Enea and his father silently dismembering chickens. Their relationship is emotionally frozen by the suicide of Enea’s mother, who killed herself in the very room where father and son now work. Enea assumes his father is ashamed of him and barely sees him, but in an early revealing moment he suddenly asks what colour his eyes are. His father answers correctly that they are blue and even remembers the mole in his left eye. This tiny exchange establishes one of the book’s central tensions: Enea feels unseen, yet the people around him may know him more intimately than he allows himself to believe.

Enea hates the butcher shop and fears becoming his father: a silent, grey man who works continuously so that he does not have to think. He once wanted to study cinema and escape Lezzago, but he has dropped out of university and returned home. His self-esteem has collapsed. He is heavier than he was at school, constantly conscious of his body, and dependent on sexual attention for reassurance. He repeatedly downloads and deletes Grindr, enjoying the brief rush of being desired while despising the app’s “meat market,” an image deliberately linked to his father’s business.

His most destructive relationship is with Salvatore Osvaldi, the boyfriend of his close friend Giuditta. Salvatore is outwardly heterosexual, conventionally attractive, insecure and casually cruel. For almost a year, he has secretly asked Enea for sexual favours, usually when drunk or high. The arrangement is humiliating because Salvatore does not treat Enea as a lover or even an equal participant. Early in the novel, after Giuditta and Andrea leave a gathering, Salvatore asks Enea to masturbate him in the bathroom. Enea is disgusted but complies because even this degrading intimacy temporarily relieves his loneliness. Salvatore cannot climax until they talk about Giuditta’s body, and Enea is left literally holding the evidence of his friend’s betrayal. Later, lying beside Salvatore, Enea imagines Leonardo DiCaprio speaking to him from a Wolf of Wall Street poster and mocking the failure of his life. These hallucinated conversations recur as manifestations of Enea’s vicious internal voice.