Florence, June 19, 2024 – He is 67 years old, has spent 40 of them building bridges around the world and has been a widower for eight months “during which he discovered that over the course of his life he had paid more attention to urgent things than to important things”. He lives in Turin, in Lungo Po Antonelli and this Sunday in November he got up early to carefully prepare a family lunch: stuffed onions, Seirass pudding (a typical Piedmontese cheese) and borage tagliatelle. It is the first time he has done so since his wife died. But something goes wrong: a granddaughter hurts herself falling from the persimmon tree, her parents take her to the emergency room and the appointment is cancelled. Worried and also a little disappointed/bitter, the man goes out for a walk and in the little park with its adjoining skate park he meets Elena and her son Gaston, also alone and looking a little lost, just like him. The man will invite them to lunch, giving himself the chance to be a father and grandfather, albeit in a new way. The man has three children: Sonia, the firstborn who lives in Biella with her husband and two daughters (they are the ones who stand him up for lunch); Alessandro who works at the European Chemicals Agency in Helsinki (“And then remember that there is no such thing as good or bad weather, but… good or bad equipment”) and then there is the middle daughter, whose name is never mentioned, who is an actress and theater director (against the wishes of her father who has opposed her in every way and with whom, for this and other reasons, she has not spoken for a long time) and who is the one who tells the story in the first person.
It is a story, balanced between nostalgia and hope, about the imperfections of love, about marital relationships but also about fathers/mothers-children and between brothers, as well as about regrets and the life that remains.
“When you reach the age your parents were when you were a child, you understand how young they were, and how restless their hearts were.” “I have never been good at managing the fragility of my parents: towards them I have never stopped feeling like a daughter and wanting to be the one looked after. It came naturally to me to think that being older than me they must be better than me, period: one of those things written in destiny. They had to be more aware, stronger, able to govern any situation with more criteria. But there comes a time (oh, yes it comes sooner or later! It has come or will come, there is no escape, we have all been there or we will all go through it, ndr.) in which the parts are reversed or at least overlap”.
“As you get older, you lose a lot of things. Especially things you didn’t know you had.”
“Looking at them (the two children splashing on the beach in the shallow water, ndr.) think of time, but not of just any time, of time at his age, of the time when summers lasted months, of the timeless time of childhood, and of the future, very distant, that future that most desired something the most the moment of getting it seemed inscrutably distant.”
“He was in no hurry. He would have no more urgencies, he thought, other than to enjoy the time that the people he cared about would give him. If he said it then, perhaps not as clearly as I am saying it now – but he certainly said it to me, years later, with sufficient clarity – that things are fixed only if you admit your mistakes; if you accept that you have made them.”
“I shouted that no, it wasn’t obvious at all, that when you love someone you have to let them know, that you have to say it, love. Say it. And show it. – Do you understand?”.
“A new complicity united us, which took nothing away from the misunderstandings of the past, which made them manageable. It was not a question of erasing or forgetting: but of forgiving. It was a new time. We had to enjoy it.”
It is a book where you will encounter, among other things: the Ultima Spiaggia bookshop in Ventotene (it really exists! The bookseller is Fabio Masi); Ernesto and Irma who on the beach of Cala Nave hid notes for each other among the rocks with poems on them; quotes and references from 4 books (which I also loved very much) by 4 writers (who I also loved very much): Richard Ford, Pablo Neruda, Raymond Carver, Walt Whitman. But on page 108 of this Einaudi edition (2019) Geda slips in a reference en passant to a fifth book, whose author I consider one of the greatest writers of the 20th century: three or more probably four of his novels are included in my special ranking of the 100 best books of the 20th century, one of which is among the top 10 (my friend Andrea S. has used it for years to hit on and impress girls. Always with success, he assures!). Let’s see if any of you readers know or guess who the mysterious author is that Geda casually throws in there.
From Fabio Geda I also highly recommend The disappearance of butterfliesEinaudi[(nnaAndreaCoraandValerioareschoolmatesinthefirstyearofhighschoolAndreawhoisagoodindeedverygoodreader–the[(nnaAndreaCoraeValeriosonocompagnidiscuolainprimasuperioreAndreacheèunodibuoneanzibuonissimeletture–ilKawabata of “Beauty and sadness” first of all but also Flannery O’Connor, Steinbeck, Osvaldo Soriano, Murakami, Buzzati, Fenoglio -, “he was still a child when for the first time he had the impression that one life was not enough and that stories were a good way to possess other ones. Cora was the frailest of the four, but in her curiosity, in her desire to learn and explain, receive and return knowledge, there was a rare quality that made her gigantic.
Together they study, have fun, cheerfully squander the summer days climbing the hills with their bikes and then lying down on an uphill meadow piled up on top of each other, “aware of their bodies, legs intertwined, skin and muscles in contact, the breath electricity of the city that shone restlessly as far as the eye could see while the wind spread the smell of jasmine and dried the sweat and the ground exhaled the heat accumulated over the day and despite the thousands of street lamps the sky was full of stars When they were serious. .. their conversations became abstract and digressive: perhaps they talked about themselves while talking about something else and they talked about something else to talk about them. They spoke in whispers like they talk in the library, with those whispers that have something erotic and make you think of secrets of lovers.”
When they spoke to each other, “Anna silently let the chatter of others caress her; she felt full of well-being and thought that at that precise moment she would ask nothing more from life than to go on like this, forever: the four of them, at night, in the summer, messing around and the gentle wind, the shrill song of the little owls and the melancholic one of the tawny owl”.
The linchpin of these existences – still brief and already marked by losses and wounds – is the shop of an elderly second-hand dealer in the alleys of Turin, a place that becomes a sort of base, sometimes a refuge.
Time, however, cannot withstand the demand for perfection, for the absolute, that adolescence demands. Desire creeps into the group and wears it down. Andrea, who perceives everything with greater intensity than the others (“That summer, while the others fled to the sea, Andrea convinced Anna to move in the opposite direction and organize a trek in the mountains, a stray week in the Cottian Alps, the two of them to alone”), little by little he isolates himself: What takes his breath away are both the impetuous beauty of the present and the sense of threat coming from the future. But when he finds himself in danger his friends, those unique friends that only a certain age gives you, will be with him again.
