Piero Colle

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Chat Line - L’amante senza volto

In the Italian-language version, this book comprises about 160 pages (“Edizioni del Labirinto”, 1999). The four-colour dust jacket bears a high-impact graphic image that reproduces a painting by Isabella Pers (“How fragile we are”). The cover price is L.25,000 (Euro 12.92) and the book’s title is: “Chat line, l’amante senza volto” (“Chat Line, the Faceless Lover”). The first page bears the following dedication:

“The future is already rooted in the present…… it has happened….”

From the film: “Excalibur”, (Merlin).

The book is structured in “episodes”, each of which is a self-contained piece of writing. Meetings take place through a technological medium, undreamt-of until only a few years ago, that is now so widely accessible around the world as to constitute a cultural phenomenon in its own right.

This is the most intriguing aspect of, and intellectually the most stimulating question posed by, the narrative. Can internet be a surrogate for happiness or is it destined to be relegated to the limbo of technological trivia, electronic illusions and the short-lived fads of contemporary culture?

The text offers many stimulating opportunities for reflection and is particularly suitable for mass distribution thanks to the topicality of the subject and the outstanding quality of the writing.

Chaste yet depraved. Passionate and ice-cold. Instructive yet foreboding. Here is the novel for internet and the chatlines, the real-time computer conversation channels. In these pages, a now allusive, now indolent group of individuals moves and observes us from the cover of the nicknames under which they present themselves to the rest of the world: Venus, a twenty-one year old cyber-siren from Michigan, whose naked thighs become the story itself under the dazzling shafts of light emitted by her monitor; Wheelchair, a would-be hacker from Hungary, wheelchair-bound after a road accident, who, thanks to a channel for the disabled, is able to construct an unexpected new life for himself and for someone else; Captain, a young Greek who works in an office. A compulsive gilder of the lily, equally obsessed by the imminence of history and military uniforms, he is the victim, rather than the author, of a spiral of violence that he has created to escape from his dreary routine; and Wolf, an inscrutable minstrel of the chatlines, who is on the point of understanding a truth suspended halfway between a virtual mystery and the ambiguity of events that are real as they are pursued through the ether of the net.

Effective interplay of dialogue with the syntax of a language penned and punctuated by the imperious clatter of the keyboard enables this book to introduce a new culture of the written word. The computer, a totem of both communication and solitude, comes to life, revealing itself to be the accomplice of modern-day escapees from boredom. Men and women whose post-modern condition offers no certainties use a totally new means to claim the age-old right to happiness, the sublime pleasure of seduction and take a wild gamble on impossible truths and fate-confounding fictions.