“I have never understood happiness. The idea seemed obscene.”
A symphony orchestra, perfectly in time, interpreting a score written just for it. Here is the relationship that binds the protagonists of this book. The author is instead the director, who explains to the reader his own setting of the story, dictating the times of the individual lines.
The center of the story is Harmony, a small town in the southern United States, similar to many other American communities, shaken by an unexpected event. One day, a young boy named Iggy accidentally sets a fire in a church, causing the deaths of twenty-five people. An unintentional act, but no less violent, given that Iggy wanted to set himself on fire inside the building of worship as a demonstrative act of rebellion, but fails in his aim.
By a strange twist of fate, Iggy survives his suicide attempt and is arrested. Locked up on death row, he will live the last period of his existence among dreams and regrets and memories, until midnight when his sentence will be carried out by lethal injection.
Alongside Iggy’s story, those of his friends and acquaintances are also told, who like him have tried to give their own meaning to life, with mixed success.
Congratulations to the Adelphi publishing house, always able to find writers capable of giving a breath of fresh air to world literature, who write books to stand the test of time, which was needed. The sense of despondency, melancholy and loneliness that we were captivated by while reading continued to accompany us even after we reached the last page. There are questions to which we will never find answers, but we thank the author for giving us the opportunity to ask ourselves these questions. Which ones are they? Everyone will discover them within themselves.
Finally, we invite you to admire the extraordinary simplicity of the writing. Short-term periods, which like sparks are capable of lighting eternal fires in the souls of readers. Despite the excellent work of the translator, we decided to read the book again in the original language to better appreciate the incandescence of the sparks.
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Michael Bible, L’ultima cosa bella sulla faccia della terra, Adelphi, Milano, 2023
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