Synopsis

Young Pellicani is a chatterbox. He shows up one evening—late one night—at his father's house, a house he had left—after stealing some savings from a certain drawer—twenty years earlier. The building, a six- or seven-story apartment building, is in a state of disrepair. But the word "Pellicani" is still there on the doorbell on the top floor; and the door is barely ajar. Young Pellicani—wearing a slightly tattered gray suit, a briefcase worn only for show—wants to stay for a night and go elsewhere: he has business in China, he claims. His father will have forgotten the events of twenty years earlier, and will gladly welcome him. However, in the apartment, young Pellicani finds only an old man. He does look a bit like Pellicani the elder, it's true, especially the nose. But an old man, after all! It's true that twenty years have passed... Young Pellicani talks and talks, describing everything he does, everything he sees, the apartment, the laundry hanging in a room, the woman who comes every day to cook the old man minestrone; young Pellicani talks and talks, and we readers are caught up in this infernal chatter, in his stubborn disbelief in what he sees, in his hypothesizing, reinventing, explaining, transfiguring the banal reality that presents itself to him: until we give up, we stop asking questions, we no longer care whether the old man in the house is Pellicani Sr., whether the man in the mirror is the real young Pellicani or an impostor: we only care to abandon ourselves to the fervor of this inexhaustible chatter. Rarely does reading a novel provide such pleasure for the writing itself; and rarely is so much narrative richness crammed so effortlessly into a single novel, a single apartment, almost a single room.