The Scortanza
Rosinello Capobianco spends his days sitting at the Fontanella di Colle di Piazza, along with a pack of layabouts. Like his buddies, he has a nickname: Rosinello dei Favizzitte, or Falsetti, for the habit of telling lies that his family has passed down from generation to generation. The point is that he conjures up "only stories, half true and half false, which then, at the end, boil into lies, stories, and fables, all in the same pot, making pizza and soup."
And yet Rosinello has lived: always on the margins, always on the brink of oblivion, he accumulated jobs and illusions, dreams and failures. He was a printer and "a skilled craftsman in the precious art of hand-binding"; he worked at the Land Reclamation Authority, turning on the water taps to irrigate the countryside around his village; he planned to emigrate to America but never did; he was hired as a doorman at the grand Palazzo Marcantonio and felt in love with the housekeeper Ginetta Petrosemolo, perhaps reciprocated, perhaps not.
And Rosinello tells and tells: his life but also that of those around him. Like Turuccio, a traveling salesman of various goods; Cenzino Sardellone, who really went to America; Menocchio Benandante, half cellarman, half poet.
With La Scortanza, Remo Rapino returns to the intensity and power of his masterpiece, The Life and Times of Bonfiglio Liborio. And he builds, through the unmistakable and poetic voice of Rosinello, a new chapter in his epic of the "sfasulati," who would like to forget a life of pain and failure but know perfectly well that memory is a nasty beast, "that turns against you like a feral cat, and you can't do anything about it except wait for the sting of the scratch."
Press reviews
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