Synopsis

They were the lion, the whale, and the deer, protagonists of an end-of-year play in which the kangaroo had disappeared and his friends had to find him. Now they are almost thirty and wander the meanders of a golden life: they eat raw fish and patanegra, drink fine wines, smoke essences, take drugs as they consumed candy as children, sail, party, pursue the arts, try their hand at politics. They have sculpted bodies and expensive clothes, they are the children of renowned chief physicians and journalists, of billionaires with solid fortunes, ancient or recent and dubious, but they are also the heirs of the rebels who have characterized glorious and desperate periods of history: those who, prospering in peace, invoked war, who, loving their parents, suffered their hypocrisies, exposed their contradictions, and dreamed of annihilation. Poldo Biancheri, “Ciccio” Tapia, Guenda Pech, Stella Marraffa, Aldo: they have it all but feel trapped, and this is their summer, the one in which they want to break out of the circle. Poldo is the narrator of their exhilaration, of their challenge: he narrates as if he saw everything from a distance, recording everything firmly but without hiding the nostalgia for a childhood still close by, the anger towards fathers who took everything, leaving only crumbs, the tenderness for siblings and peers capable of hurting each other in protest or out of love. Poldo has brought The Antichrist with him on the boat, in which Nietzsche seems to be speaking about them: "Let us look ourselves in the face: we are Hyperboreans... We have found the way out of entire millennia of labyrinth. Beyond the north, beyond the ice and death: our life, our happiness..." Pietro Castellitto's narrative debut is as surprising as the work of art hurled by its protagonists into a pool, painful like the voice of a suffering child and yet capable of moments of enchantment, like the eyes of a deer that shine as the night fades.