It’s a story of returns, that of Teo, who is twenty-eight years old and has done what many of his generation are forced to do: he left the southern province and has lived in Milan for years. In «La vita nuova» (Mondadori), in bookstores from today, the new novel – the third, after «Gli affamati», Ponte alle Grazie 2020, and «Cieli in flame», Mondadori 2023, Comisso under 36 prize – by Mattia Insolia from Catania, born in 1995 (and who now lives in Milan), the South that rhymes with «departure» and also with «return», in a perennial dialectic within many lives, not only of those who leave but also of those who remain. And Teo returns because two of his best friends from high school, Giorgio and Matilde, are getting married. Finding them again will mean finding a whole past, and the group of high school friends who shared everything, bonded as one can only be in that auroral phase of life. When the joys are sharp and the pains more, the thirst for the future is as strong as the wounds, every wound (“the future was promised to us, they told us it would be wonderful”). And there is one, collective, shared between the six of them. Silenced. Something that happened in my senior year of high school. That’s where Teo will return, to that breaking event. And he will have to discover, by retying his, their threads, what those boys have become, what happened to those wounds, that vital impulse. A question we are all destined to ask: where were we, how were we, and who and what are we today?
Mattia Insolia is 30 years old, and has the heart and pen necessary to resist that storm and tell a story about it, for everyone.
By courtesy of the publisher, we publish here an excerpt from «La vita nuova».
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I open my eyes as I have just passed the intersection and I have just enough time to read the “Welcome to Foro” sign. The setting sun shines on him weakly, as if it wasn’t worth it, but it’s clear that he’s faded and tired anyway.
I haven’t been back to Foro since 2013 – about nine years; the summer of graduation had just ended, Obama was president again while here Letta was trying to repair what had been broken by Berlusconi and what Monti had failed to mend. If it had been up to me, I would have persevered in my confinement, but on Saturday Giorgio and Matilde are getting married and I decided to return for three days – sooner or later I would have had to. I stayed away from Foro as if it were radioactive – just as you would stay away from Chernobyl. I didn’t come back for Christmas, Easter and friends’ birthdays, for my parents’ anniversaries and my mother’s illness. Yes, I had to do it. And then I’m twenty-eight years old: I think the time has come for me to learn to deal with things.
I know I give the impression of being a bad person – an ungrateful, vile and disgusting son: he doesn’t return home even if his mother is dying – but I have my reasons and I will tell you about them little by little. And in any case, in all this time I have seen my parents: they often came to visit me in Milan. They haven’t done it for almost three years, my mother’s health has worsened, and if I decided to return it’s also for this reason. The point is that crossing the homeland of our demons is a difficult operation, and I have waited for my evil spirits to fade.
Anyway, here I am: I’m back.
The houses on the outskirts have chipped wooden boards, the paint has come off here and there and the facades are stained a dry, sad brown; the window panes are opaque, the shutters crooked as if someone had tried to tear them off, the patches of weed grass, burnt by the summer which in recent days is beginning to give way to an otherwise warm autumn, are occupied by slides, swings, gazebos and plastic tables devoured by weeds.
Ten minutes and I’m in the center – the atmosphere is the same.
Shutters down – dust and filth encrust the bolts -, signs saying “For rent” on the windows of shops, restaurants and bars. Da Mario e Mariangela, the restaurant where I went with my parents, resists, but Mario sinks into a plastic chair, one of the garden ones, and doesn’t seem very busy. The usual idiots, pub I used to hang out with the kids, has been replaced by a Chinese shop. Mille e una, the tuttomille shop where my mother bought things for the house, is open, but the sign is broken, the windows are filled with faded goods – the smiling married couples embracing between the fake gold frames look like ghosts. The Holden bookshop has closed and now there is what appears to be a sex shop. The newsstands, closed, full of graffiti, are boulders like those of Stonehenge: they stay there and no one knows why.
The empire of abundance disgusts the periphery and rejects it, with the impiety of totalitarian regimes, towards a fate of indolent degradation. Thomas Stearns Eliot said that the world would end not with a crash, but with a whimper. I am not certain that humanity will end like this and yet, certainly, the Italian province respects his prophecy. They said that the South would become a desert. And so it was: the people fled, few remained in the Forum and those who are still here are making do; strays fighting in the garbage. Companies hire in the North, and those who have been able to study must migrate to avoid starvation wages, sacrificing their family, their origins, their old dreams – and all in the name of a future that is struggling to reveal itself. It’s very sad, I know, but this story also makes you laugh, I promise.
Out of the centre, I head towards Valleverde, the suburban neighborhood where I was born and raised and where my parents still live – in the same house, squeezed between others that are absolutely identical to each other.