THE recent successes of Mario Desiati, Strega prize with Spatriateand Veronica Raimo, Strega Giovani with Nothing truemark an important watershed between the first and the after of recent Italian fiction. It is a generational divide that finally lifts the veil on a new humanity that has in common a sense of strong estrangement, as Raimo calls it, and which Desiati summarizes in the expression “Expatriates”. That in his dialect (which is also mine) it means yes, literally expatriates, wanderers, fools, but also devoid of orientation, dispersed, almost suspended in midair.
The 40-year-olds from Desiati and Raimo
The two books, curiously similar in geographical referencesand not only, to Puglia (as an archaic land) and Berlin (as a place of possibilities), they are very different in style: lyrical that of Desiati, ironic that of Raimo. But they are united by the thesis that today’s forties are free from points of reference previous ones and they are not looking for new ones, almost certain that it is better to float in indeterminacy.
“It seems that truth can only exist in reticence,” writes Raimo. “I wanted everything but I always had to settle for something»: Desiati quotes Tondelli, telling the parallel story of those who leave and those who stay, where those who leave often find new cages in which to lock themselves up, while those who remain struggle to break the usual ones. The feeling is that the present is the only possible timebecause the future does not show signs of itself, while the past is material that can be reshuffled to tell oneself at will, omitting and adding.
Generations in comparison
Love is fluidnot only in the most current sense, but also for how it is lived: this too is not a fixed point of life but something that does not belong to us, such as work that is always precarious, always on the move, when there is. Previous generations are the background to these narratives and do not come out well: the shield of clichés, the lying network of relationships, thea hood of prejudices, typical of adults, is something to escape from without looking too far back. If books are made to look within, these are an unmissable opportunity to do so.
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