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473 pages, Paperback
First published October 29, 2014
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes...again
Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand
In a...desperate land
Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah
~The Doors, "The End"
I fair, she dark, I calm, she anxious, I likeable, she malicious, the two of us opposite and united….
“Aunt Lina has a husband just as you do, and that husband is Rino’s father, his name is Stefano Carracci. Then she has Enzo, Enzo Scanno, who sleeps with her. And the exact same thing happens with you: you have Papa, whose name is Airota, but you sleep with Nino, whose name is Sarratore.” I smiled to reassure her. “How did you ever learn all those surnames?” “Aunt Lina talked to us about it, she said that they’re stupid. Rino came out of her stomach, he lives with her, but he’s called Carracci like his father. We came out of your stomach, we live much more with you than with Papa, but we’re called Airota.”Elena became a successful writer and Lila took on, and won, the IT world. True to her curious intelligence, she conquered every challenge she ever set for herself. The one thing Lila never did though, was write a book, in competition with Elena. Yet, her story was the one being told in the end ...
"Today, as I write, I’m embarrassed at the way fortune continued to favor me. The book immediately aroused interest. Some were thrilled by the pleasure of reading it. Some praised the skill with which the protagonist was developed. Some talked about a brutal realism, some extolled my baroque imagination, some admired a female narrative that was gentle and embracing. In other words there were many positive judgments, but often in sharp contrast to one another, as if the reviewers hadn’t read the book that was in the bookstores but, rather, each had evoked a fantasy book fabricated from his own biases. On one thing, after the article in Panorama, they all agreed: the novel was absolutely different from the usual kind of writing about Naples."It was difficult to come back into the story after waiting so many months for the forth book to surface. There were too many characters to be remembered and too many events that shaped the story. However, the story slowly filtered back into the memory.