Synopsis

Picozzi's is not an illness you can see immediately. It acts slowly. It tires. It bends. It knocks you down. Picozzi's is an illness that grows alongside the curious, sharp, and intelligent gaze of the little girl, the teenager, the woman who is her daughter. Picozzi's is multiple sclerosis, rigorously and violently rejected like an invader. "The Bones of Gabibbo" is the story of this invasion and the resistance that follows: paradoxical, funny, and moving. And it is also the story of a girl who follows her mother's downward spiral, recounting, irreverently and comically, her awkward homosexual experiments, her flirtations, her friendship with a beautiful and somewhat unlucky classmate, and her bizarre love affair with Codino, the mechanic. The backdrop is the Italian province, the roads that climb hills, life on four wheels, and the walls that form the boundary of the anxiety of living. Virginia Virilli has written a fast-paced and very sweet novel, an original and disconcerting testimony of an impertinent face-to-face with pain.