Synopsis

Elia isn't very good at feeling. He walks around with his thumb on the Zippo lighter, and inside he feels a never-ending pain. Then Camilla arrives, approaching him "as if he owed her an explanation, a seat next to him on the bus, a little affection." And signs from the past arrive that are like slaps, or caresses. Perhaps even the overwhelming love of your twenties can't save you from the restlessness and provincialism; sometimes, however, there are people and thoughts and details that can make the future a less frightening place. "Bagai" is the debut of a writer born in 2000, but it's not a generational novel: it's a powerful scream. Proof that talent doesn't wait, it simply exists.

"Bagai is him, bagai is Andrea, bagai are the boys from Pandino, from the province, those who run without direction, who escape from a world in flames.".

Pandino doesn't have much to offer an eighteen-year-old: nine thousand inhabitants, fifteen bars, ten hairdressers, five takeaway pizzerias, an Enel tower crisscrossed with generations of graffiti, two churches, a shrine, not even a bookshop. Elia has always lived within this confines: school, the occasional party, his activist best friend who tries in vain to shake him up with his political battles, his father who gives it his all even though it's never enough. When Camilla suddenly appears in his life, she may seem like a flash of light, but with him—and with his apathy, with the wall he's built between himself and the world year after year—everything is more difficult. Because inside him burns an uncontrollable, ever-throbbing pain. A suffering that engulfs everything, even the few things he truly cares about. Elia is someone who hurts those close to him, inadvertently; he wants to open up, but he doesn't know where to start. And Camilla, with her bitten nails, with her gaze that's "like an infection," with music, with books, tries to melt this ice: but the end of school is just around the corner, and immediately afterward they'll have to invent a future far from there, because after all, no one "would waste their whole life in a shitty swamp." It's hard, however, to imagine what happens next: "Half of us will end up at a Dutch university, the other half serving in a pub in London, which is now even outside of Europe... oh well, let's do Berlin." Samuele Cornalba is in his early twenties, and in his primo romanzo he simply described what he knows best: how the mind of a boy born in 2000 works. He draws us into Elia's story effortlessly, with poetic images and dialogue of unsettling authenticity. It only takes a moment for all of us, young or old, to see ourselves reflected in his writing. To recognize ourselves.