A GRAN GIORNATE
(At much days)
Publishers La Linea, collection Tam Tam, 2012
ISBN: 978-88-97462-20-0
Pp. 256, euro 14

A few men, odd, inadequate, lonely, escaping or looking for something, leave to travel in countries that are somewhat familiar. Each of them is missing something indefinable and essential (a woman maybe, or a job, or happiness). They are called Onorato Casamagna, Tullio Semenzani, Franz Spaventa, Gabriele Angous, Marius Duprez, Nathan, Ollssen; a narrative “I” has joined them and records all of their moves, intercept all of their thoughts. At first, they wander alone, along paths that are unsatisfactory but irrevocable, then, little by little, they meet one another, they form a group contentiously united and, squeezed into a van, they discover the advantages of being together in a world that is always more strange and hostile, cluttered with threats, monsters, undecipherable allegories.
The novel, adventurous, picaresque, funny and grotesque, is composed of fragments numbered like the chapters of Petronius’ Satyricon and freely recalls Verne, Poe, Buzzati or Landolfi. It is a book that frames with precision the contradictions of our time: the irresistible strength of our instincts and impulses, but also the courteous education and the verbosity that shape personal relationships and the little subterfuges with which the daily necessities deceive themselves. It is an enjoyable and distressing epic story of humble people that narrates the inexhaustible effort to overcome the human condition, halfway between the abysses of existentialism and the chasm of a sit-com.

In Il Manifesto, Paolo Morelli talks about the characters of A Gran Giornate: “Drifting and whimsical like a plot already written, the fortuitous comrades throw themselves in a place where they cannot get lost, because they got lost there before, in a place we are not to know. It is like being in an odd and accurate buzzatian pattern enclosing an essential course à la Calvino and some slapstick deviations of the first Celati”. For Giuseppe Giglio, of La Sicilia, the novel is “a provocative book, written by an illusionist who plays hide and seek. A book that recounts life through the thought of death. The story unfolds in a picaresque phenomenology of evil. Not the spectacular evil, as in many roman noir, but a familiar, shifty, creeping grey evil of daily life”.
Fabrizio Ottaviani, in Il Giornale, reasons that “If you like authors with an unbridled imagination but would prefer it to be at the service of a life philosophy free of lies, Morandini is for you. He will bring you in a place where everything is the allegory of something that we do not know or that we know so well that we are now unable to speak about without the attenuation of the fable”.

The first pages of the novel are on:
http://www.10righedailibri.it/prime-pagine/gran-giornate.

The booktrailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQJVUWbCQjk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZdbz5WlceM

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