The flight of opportunity | Mangialibri since 2005, never a diet

During an auction, there are many people you can meet: collectors, second-hand dealers, simply curious people and people who have lost everything in those auctions. And it was during one of those – specifically in room 7 of the Hotels des Ventes on rue Drouot – that he noticed Renant for the first time. Sitting next to him, he appeared like a distinguished gentleman with a problem of dandruff and bad odor who was listlessly reading a newspaper. On that occasion he was animated only to win an art deco watch, for the modest sum of eleven thousand francs. A watch that is not particularly refined, on the contrary. He still remembers it precisely for its ugliness: an oval dial, lacquered white, with numbers and a brass frame. The hands stopped at 12 o’clock, a sign of its non-functioning, as well as the date shown, inexorably blocked at 18 March 1948. To crown the features of dubious taste of the object, a bronze ballerina contrasting on the alabaster green of the body of the watch . A conquest that had animated Renant, giving him the look of someone who had just concluded the deal of his life. An almost primordial joy that made that strange individual remain in his mind and therefore allowed him to recognize him when, a few months later, he met him buying the same watch. This time not at an auction, but at a second-hand dealer. At Marché aux Pruces, for the same amount: eleven thousand francs, for a watch that seems to be – once again – “a perfect opportunity: to take back part of the past that, who knows how and why, it had lost”…

“I know those guys, the ones who go in search of the past. […] In love with the past, they would like to return to those happy times. Deluded. They don’t know that nothing is repeatable, nothing comes back. We lose everything, nor does repossessing something we loved give us back the time we loved.” Thirty years after its first publication (which took place in 1994 for Longanesi) and after the 2004 re-edition for Fazi, it returns to the Fondanti series by TerraRossa Edizioni The flight of the Opportunitythe first book of a never-finished trilogy dedicated to the supernatural (the project stalled with the publication of the second volume, dedicated to werewolves, Hunters at night). The protagonists of the novel – born “as a bet, a revenge for what I considered a wrong” – are Renant, Blanche – femme fatale – and Altay, who constitute a love triangle into which the protagonist desperately tries to enter. It is no coincidence that the narrative voice of this novel, which can rightly be defined as a noir, remains nameless: a way to allow even more complete identification, also leaving the reader with the illusion of being able to quickly grasp that an opportunity that is now lost and belongs to the past. Time that passes inexorably is the key to the narrative, in a constant spiral that seems to always repeat itself in the same way but which is never the same, not even for the ghosts. Paris is the ideal backdrop for this story veiled in nostalgia which, as in a game of Chinese boxes, is always able to reveal something other than what it seems. “You never know each other enough. Never deep enough. In the depths of the soul. We are never sincere. Even with ourselves.”