Synopsis

The author draws on her own personal experience to create a novel about illness and the friendship between two women united by a hospital room and the realization that they want to change their lives. Luce is in the hospital. In her medical records, she's found an English term: "bulky." This is the name of her illness, of that rare tumor that must be removed. A name that also encompasses the coldness and aseptic nature of her medical history, her treatments, her recovery. Her roommate is an elderly, unbearable woman. A former cook angry at the world, with the kind of anger that hurts because she tells the truth. For Luce, time seems to stand still, her sense of inadequacy grows, the days stumble over a new grammar, which the two women must learn to discover they have something in common beyond their illness: an unfinished business with their own lives. Raffaella Simoncini tells the story of two destinies that, despite themselves, intertwine in a present devoid of certainties. And she does so with a novel in which this present becomes an unexplored seabed to be explored in order to reach the surface and slip away, like the paper origami the protagonist made with her grandmother as a child.