“Only dead fish go with the current.”
Sweet, attentive, unscrupulous, acute. A text that is read with pleasure and that makes you happy in reading. In the same way the protagonist (and how could she not be otherwise?), Margherita Dolcevita has a nickname that characterizes (at least in Italian language) her both emotionally and physically, the usual clever pun that the author has accustomed us to in his books.
Margherita is a fourteen-year-old teenager, full of life, cheerful and sparkling who colors the heart of her family and the various characters who live her daily life: each of them a single color that makes up Margherita’s rainbow. A simple family, with a beautiful house outside the town, but not yet in the open countryside, where life flows in harmony.
To disturb this bucolic corner of the world, a black glass cube appears one day, surrounded by an alien hedge. With this business card, the new neighbors, the Del Bene family, who will upset the life of Margherita’s family, are presented. Father, mother and the two brothers fall victim to the charm of their new neighbors, only Margherita and her grandfather (who in the meantime are forced into a long-term hospital due to an accident) will be the only ones not to fall into the trap. Indeed, Margherita will go in search of that last secret linked to the Del Bene family, whose protagonist is their (almost) repudiated son.
We had already read other books by the same author, and for those who know him, this too hasn’t left us dissatisfied. The writing is fresh and light, but never predictable. The puns and subtleties are sown with care, without hindering the reading, or disturbing it. Margherita with her full of life and youth and with healthy moral values at her young age, is our heroine, a character that we think in the future can have a second life, in a continuous ideal of the story told.
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Stefano Benni, Margherita Dolcevita, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2005
