“You fall before you fall.”
Following a fall from a horse, just outside the riding school he manages with his partner, Luca discovers that he is a man on the verge of an existential crisis. The few certainties on which he had built the second part of his life, in the countryside of central Italy, crumble. The physical pain of falling opens the doors to the latent pain of the soul.
After a short period of recovery in the hospital, Luca returns to the normalcy of his life, but nothing appears to him as before. Anna, his partner, becomes a stranger whose presence he finds annoying as well as the economic and organizational problems of the riding school: Luca is a foreigner in his house.
To attract his attention in the period of emotional-existential transition will be a young woman, who together with her sister, will introduce Luca to the possibility of a new beginning, of a different perspective on life, not better than the previous one, but simply different.
Tenth published novel by the author, we noticed some elements of discontinuity in the elaboration of the text to what we used to read and, if you like, also in the story told, with a large part of the story dedicated to the intimate world of the protagonist. To remind us to find ourselves in front of a book by De Carlo, the usual broad references to the world of horses and music.
Going back to Luca, the protagonist, we were not positively impressed by the construction of his character; we had the impression of finding ourselves in front of a mask already read in other past novels by the same author.
Could this affect the quality of the work, or lead us to discourage reading it? Absolutely not, because the author’s style is always pleasant, it flows away with a fluid and experimental syntax at the same time. We suggest it to those looking for a good quick and undemanding reading and also to younger kids, for the quality of the work, but only if you haven’t entered the world of De Carlo before, it would be preferable to do it with other books by the same author.
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Andrea De Carlo, In the moment, Mondadori, Milano, 1999
