“I don’t have time to go to the seaside”, the new book by Mari Accardi

“I don’t have time to go to the sea” (Nutrimenti) by Mari Accardi will be released in bookshops on 7 June.

Synopsis.

For Matilde it is no longer possible to put off dealing with her own insecurities. Maybe it’s time to be ‘guided’ to the end: of her family and of herself. Playing with the tones of comedy and their reverse, in which the tragic always resonates, Mari Accardi focuses on the astonishing effort of being tourists – bold but not too much – in the unpredictable landscape of our lives.

After the failure of her dream of being a screenwriter and returning from an escape abroad, for Matilde there is only one plan B: to return to Sicily and improvise as a tourist guide. You will have to guide groups of mostly foreign and revved-up seventy-year-olds through the streets and alleys of Palermo, allowing yourself to be influenced by their enthusiasm. What if she came to consider them an alternative family? In a representation of mass tourism always drawn on the edge of irony, and at times hilarious, Mari Accardi tells the personal destiny of a young Sicilian woman. We need to loosen some defenses, pulverize mistrust and look clearly at the family of origin. The real one.

A father engaged in an intense conversation with cats, closed in an old Audi as if in a bunker, a mother whose Pillars of Hercules are the church and the local supermarket. And a grandmother who projects her dominant anguish – the intrusiveness of strangers – even into the post-mortem. What if they occupied her grave? The only person he trusts is the caregiver of Romanian origins, Adela. It’s a shame that she suddenly loses track of her, generating almost unmanageable turbulence. Everything gets complicated, everything seems to be falling apart: real family, presumed family.