Saturday 15 June 2024at 7.00 pm, the stage in front of the Libraccio bookshop Florence (via de’ Cerretani, 16r), on the occasion of the exhibition “The book squares“, will host the book presentation meeting “Nocturnal animals” by Carlotta Vagnoli (Einaudi Editore).
If you’re in your twenties in the Noughties, your chances are slim. The myth of work in a suit and tie, with a mortgage and bourgeois aspirations, is pure utopia. This also applies to Milan, which however lives a double existence: during the day it is the gray city of offices and turnover, after sunset it becomes a seductive metropolis in which to abandon yourself. And then, since the future is no longer an option, all that remains is the night. And with the night the music, the alcohol, the cocaine, the PR people, the cubists, the bouncers and the queues in front of the clubs. It is on these evenings that we meet Mick, the prince of parties, and Mon Chéri, who earns his living doing lap dances. And then there is a girl with red hair who in that glittering and bizarre world would desperately like to understand who she really is. Together with the nocturnal animals we move in a swarm: from the bars where we get drunk to the underground clubs, from the humid air of the nightclubs to the after-hours in the apartments while it is already dawn outside. The goal is to participate in a very long, infinite party, because if everyone wants it at the same time, maybe the sun won’t rise over Milan the next day. But when people start jumping from buildings, and when the presence of a sexual predator generates a climate of psychosis, the nocturnal animals understand that their territory is under attack. With the confidence of someone who drank those years by the drop, Carlotta Vagnoli captures the end of an era and the beginning of another. When cell phones still had real buttons, Facebook took its first steps and we stayed in touch on Myspace. After having found the most effective words to talk about femicide and gender violence, with this lysergic novel Vagnoli gives voice to a generation perpetually excluded, exploited, set aside: that of millennials. The first real shattered photograph of girls and boys that someone, one day, decided to chew up and spit out without even looking in their eyes.
Carlotta Vagnoli was born in 1987. She published Cursed bad luck. Seeing, recognizing and rejecting gender violence (Fabbri 2021), Poverine. How feminicide is not told (Einaudi 2021) and Memory of my cheerful whores (Marsilio 2022). Nocturnal Animals (Einaudi 2024) is her first novel.
For more information: www.libraccio.it
