The Soldier
Shortlisted at the Perelà Prize for fiction
The soldier of the title of what may fairly be considered the first significant novel about the Italian decline is a young man in his early thirties who runs a pharmacy in Arezzo with his father. He is prosperous. He has a relationship with a young woman, a relationship that provides him with emotional stability and a satisfactory sexual routine. He has long ago abandoned his youthful artistic aspirations. This is a normal life, in a prosperous Italian city at the turn of the twenty-first century, and yet this life seems to have slowly filled the protagonist with a sense of frustration and a dark malaise. It is when he attempts to break free from all the things that keep him from becoming a grown man that the “soldier” finds himself faced with a ferocious, cynical, and appalling reality—the Italy of our times. And he passes through a landscape that has nothing in common with the postcard Chianti-shire familiar to foreigners, but is instead a succession of industrial sheds, malls and shopping centers, dicey bars, and Slavic women willing to do anything to achieve prosperity. Together these separate tiles make up a mosaic of a bloodthirsty struggle for survival, a powerful novel about the present-day struggle between the generations in Italy.
Press reviews
Luca Ricci - Il Messaggero
Stassi reinterpreta liberamente le vite dei personaggi libreschi, raccontando sempre in prima persona, comunicando lidea di una sorta di ribellione pirandelliana del personaggio rispetto alla storia ...Leggi
Darwin Pastorin - Liberazione
Come naufragare in un libro e ritrovarsi nella libreria di FerlinghettiLeggi