Around Three O’Clock

This short novel is dedicated to all those who, at around three o’clock on that September 11th, were not there.

At around nine o’clock in the morning in New York City on September 11, 2001, the time in Naples, Italy, was just before three in the afternoon. The destruction, death, and terror that followed the kamikaze attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington—symbols of American political, economic, and military power—overwhelmed the world with a sense of impending danger. In the hours that followed, the means of international communication spoke of nothing else, and no one could be certain what the attacks meant or whether more were on their way. Italians, of course, learned of the attacks on America just as many Americans did—from obsessive, incredulous television coverage, in frantic phone calls from friends and loved ones, and “What happened in America” became a mysterious signal, a watershed moment between “life before” and “life after.”

The cities of Naples, Italy and New York, New York, lie along virtually the same line of latitude—but, in Longo’s view, their similarities are far more than geographic. Andrej Longo’s Più o meno alle tre (Meridiano Zero, 2002) was the first Italian novel to use the 9/11 attacks as the subject matter for literature, and it remains one of the few works of fiction in any language to explore the immediate impact of September 11th on average people—on working-class men and women caught, as they attended to personal dramas and everyday routines, by an event whose nearly ungraspable magnitude reproportions their experiences.

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