Who is Silvia? Silvia is a middle-aged woman, married for many years to Mauro, an engineer who is perpetually dissatisfied with his job – a good man, no one can deny it -, mother of Valeria – a teenager attending the classical high school -, a teacher by profession; she leads a fairly flat life and without excesses in P***, a well-known Alpine capital, just over an hour from Turin. Thanks to the insistence of her friend Ada, Silvia has allowed herself to take part in a writing course, attended with great diligence, like a nerd, let’s say it, and finally arriving at a diploma on the back of which she pins her desire to become an established writer. So Silvia begins to manipulate words, neither spontaneously nor with too much meticulousness, looking for a captivating narrative plot and following the advice given by her teachers on the course. She relies on an agent who suggests the title to her The blue while you smile at me and waits confidently for her manuscript to find someone to take it on. But the weeks pass and the agent’s silence, if not his tendency to avoid Silvia’s phone calls, make her more and more nervous, resigned, annoyed, helpless. Until she receives the news: the publishing house B*** would like to publish her, on conditions that are all in all acceptable. She can hardly celebrate, partly out of modesty, partly out of superstition, but from that phone call from her agent, everything starts to spin wildly: the editing phase, the last drafts released, the book in hand…and then the presentations in the bookstores that allow her to meet various people…
The story told by Guido Conterio is a story of searching for and defining one’s own identity, of relationships that take on different forms as soon as routine is abandoned in favor of a life more in line with one’s desires; it is a story of boredom, of dragged-out loves and unlikely lovers that allow parts of oneself to emerge that have been dormant for a long, too long time. It is the story of a family that suddenly finds itself going off the pre-established path, reinventing itself, defining itself in a new and creative way, promising and allowing, perhaps, each member to find a different path, even if the destination is not yet too clear. The writing is truly unique given that the author uses, as usual, a refined, refined language, which he indifferently sticks to the various characters who thus appear to all have the same voice. This, in my opinion, slows down the reading, or rather: this carefully chosen vocabulary is much more emerging than the story and ends up almost devouring it. At first you are almost intimidated by this refinement of style, then you get used to it and appreciate the use of obsolete and not too common terms, you enjoy the rhythm of the sentences of which you can sense the studied and long analyzed construction; in the end the writing is so jarring with the story told, that you cannot help but recognize an ironic intent. What emerges is a provincial story, outlined over a long period of time, of people who are all in all common, predictable and that we see from above, without going too deep into the torments of individuals, sensing the grotesque and unpredictable side of life.
