What we are capable of: the true Italian novel

Dear Sebastiano, I devoured your latest novel, " Di cosa siamo capace, " published by La Nave di Teseo . Certainly for the beauty of your language, both direct and cultured, and certainly for the story you tell, which we could define as "History with a capital H," given that you chronicle our country from the late 1960s onward. I was undoubtedly struck by the shift in perspective as I read it. As I followed the adventures of the two protagonists, Adele and Nina, mother and daughter, the former in her early twenties in 1968, the latter in the early 1990s, I initially thought you wanted to talk about disillusionment, what could have been and wasn't, normalization replacing revolution, opportunism instead of ideals. Me, no longer Us. But an author of your caliber isn't content to simply rehash events that have already happened. So I said to myself: you're not talking about yesterday—that would be too obvious—but about tomorrow.

The point is where we look. If the present seems suffocating, it's not because we're nostalgic for a past that opened onto a nearly infinite range of possibilities; what we long for is the future. Why give up building it? We're still here, after all, even if suffocated by sadness, crushed by regret. These are widespread feelings, as if we've resigned ourselves to not counting, not making a difference. Perhaps we're a little battered, more so than our grandparents and parents were in those crucial years, but with similar needs. We've forgotten that we're capable of great things. Of making history, in fact.

The problem, you seem to suggest, is that when it comes to acting, we give in to laziness. Your characters, driven by healthy fury and full of good intentions, ultimately let themselves be led by events. This isn't necessarily a mistake; you just need to know what you really want. On the other hand, the function of an intellectual isn't to provide answers, but to ask the right questions. A role you embody fully, and you do so with care over the text, the structure, the plot, with this comings and goings over time, but without ever losing sight of the overall design, which are typical characteristics of novels destined to endure. The literary, cinematic, and historical anecdote references belong to our collective memory; in each line, we can find a little piece of ourselves. In the novel, there's never a lapse, a shortcut, a banal word, or a joke thrown in for effect, as if to remind us that we deserve the best, and not just as readers. Every now and then, someone whispers that contemporary literature lacks a "true Italian novel." It seems to me, Sebastiano, that you wrote it.

Simona Baldelli