Lo Zoo - Surfing the Web for Good and Evil. Exploitation and Rebellion

Imprisonment, exploitation, extermination, deportation and the obliteration of the ‘different’ are themes central to post war warfare, especially relevant to the Holocaust but also more broadly to the vulnerable – homosexuals, gypsies, the disabled. The theme extends to violence perpetrated on children and women. From the eighties onwards the attention has shifted to a specific type of exploitation, linked to human trafficking across geographic and virtual boundaries. Noir, a realistic genre focusing on the most disjointed aspects of humanity, has often represented and has become the voice of the victims of these new realities through literature and cinema (Carroli, 2013). This chapter outlines the characters of the novel Lo Zoo who, through their Internet use, trace an imperfect watershed between good and evil. Marilù Oliva has made innovative contributions to the genre by the use of an eclectic style and discourse. Lo Zoo, defined by Pegorari as the highest point in Oliva’s itinerary, before Le spose sepolte, is a text that parodies or subverts the conventions of the traditional detective story with the intention, or at least the effect, of putting the Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, 1961), rather than the murderers, at the centre of the tale.37