“Breathe. You are alive.”
For those who know the author, and have also read her previous works, this book can be defined as what in television jargon is called a spin off, that is, where the protagonists previously appeared in other stories as secondary characters. Be careful though, because the ideal link between the books stops here, the rest of the story is a separate story, with its own beginning and end.
The two protagonists we are talking about are Cloro and Leo. Cloro is an internet celebrity, before the advent of social media as we know them today, known throughout the world. She is a girl synonymous with life: she herself is life.
Leo, about ten years older, is instead synonymous with disillusionment, with a long list of missed opportunities, sometimes through her fault and sometimes not, symbol of an entire generation.
Due to a series of events the two find themselves having to take a trip by car, from Sicily to Lombardy, in which they will discover a lot about themselves. They will come across a sect (or commune?), in which they will return to the world where technology is stuck in the nineties.
The structure of the story closely reminds us of Andrea De Carlo’s texts from the nineties, those ranging from “Seduction Techniques” to “Nel moment”, even if the writing style is different. But this made us reflect that perhaps the last decade of the last century is the real protagonist of the book. A look back at what has been, for better or for worse, without too many recriminations other than the time that has passed and that will not return; all perfectly symbolized by the currency adopted in the sect where Cloro and Leo will live for a certain period: plastic pacifiers.
We had two members of our editorial staff read this text, and we had two totally different responses like few other times. One of the two totally loved it, going to the bookshop to look for other works by the author, but the other didn’t. So if after reading you are among those who love it or not, don’t worry, it happened to us too.
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Eleonora C. Caruso, Doveva essere il nostro momento, Mondadori, Milano, 2023