“Holiness cannot be diluted, as indeed can’t the sins.”
The story told is that of a group of teenagers (Vela, Best, Paolino and Ivan) in the last summer before crossing the “Shadow line”. The desire to grow and forge ahead will lead them to discover the profound meaning of friendship, the value of sex and love, up to that of death. Before the beginning of summer, our boys find a lifeless drug addict in a shack near a landfill that serves as their base of operations. Instead of warning the authorities they decide to hide the body so as not to see their shack seized, and the weight of this unfortunate choice will accompany them throughout the summer.
A story in which all those who were young at the turn of the 80s and 90s will find themselves, with that aftertaste of melancholy that envelops the memories of the past and of the spring of life, when innocence was a value taken for granted in himself and in others.
The book is set in Milan, or rather its suburbs, where the adventures of our protagonists take place (and here, due to the way it is described, we think there is a strong autobiographical character of the author). The suburb is different from the city, it is at the same time part of it, but a distant, forgotten body, where the children of those who live on the margins have few meeting places, or else they create them, just like a landfill. A parallel world in which a teenager must be good at dodging dangers first of all, and maybe hide, and maybe give vent to their greed, and maybe make bad choices and then repent.
The book can be read in two afternoons, without too much effort. Without excessive pretensions, we can define it as a pleasant summer reading. We advise everyone to savor in the mouth the faint taste of lost childhood that remains at the end of the reading, like the smell of clean laundry just thrown out of the washing machine, mixed with the heaviness of the smell of wet clothes.
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Fabio Guarnaccia, While everything changes, Manni, San Cesario di Lecce, 2021
