Senza significato. Una lettura di Le stelle fredde

The article analyzes Guido Piovene’s novel, Le stelle fredde (1970), a work that summarizes crucial themes of his writing and establishes a disorienting relationship with the idea of the end. The first two sections study the use of stylistic strategies such as the ironic rewriting of genres and languages (catalogue, photography, detective story) and a progressive abstraction of the discourse, reinforced by long essayistic segments that slow down the action and deconstruct the plot's resolutive function. The article also problematizes the book's categorization as a novel-essay. Although critics and Piovene himself have wavered on this point due to the conspicuous speculative digressions (such as the appearance of Dostoevsky, read as a figure of palinode and nihilism), the essayistic element is also interpreted as background noise in a world without principles, where the maximum objective is description, not comprehension. The concluding section proposes a comparison of variants between the unpublished typescript found in Piovene’s Archive in Vicenza and the printed text, in order to highlight the novel's tautological vocation.