Useful for ispurpose?

Faced with the immense archive of data and news that overwhelms us every day, the ancient role of literature seems to pale: no novel can match the complexity of contemporary chronicles, with their live updates, while millions of plots and extraordinary stories are just a click away. In a society of retromaniacs, even the goal of "making memory" seems superfluous.
The "Unidentified Narrative Objects" that appear in bookstores today try to be up to this challenge. Spurious and mestizo texts, with their experimental mix of documents and fictions, and their oblique gaze on the world, assemble maps that give meaning to the past, allowing one to cross the present and think about the future. On course with the three famous Manzonian coordinates - the true as a subject, the interesting as a means and the useful for its purpose - these new historical novels offer us the archive as a subject, fiction as a tool and testimony as a purpose.