IL LIBRO DELLE CASE

The new novel by one of the most original European writers, destined to become a literary event. The secrets of a man, called "I", and a country as seen through the eyes of the homes that have guarded them. Andrea Bajani traces the great fresco of a sentimental education in square metres.

This is the story that the homes would tell if they could speak: the story that they would reveal about the lives, loves and quarrels, about the impulses and falls of those who lived in them. I has many homes. The first is the Underground Home in Rome: it is below ground level but you can hear the cannon firing blanks at the city from the Janiculum every day. There, I takes his first steps into the seventies, while he shares the space with the rest of his family, and while the images of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro and those of Pasolini's body found at the Idroscalo, are broadcasted on television. I's story jumps from home to home, up and down through the years, each one a piece of a puzzle built between the last quarter of the millennium and the first quarter of the 2000s: he is a young lover of a married woman in a provincial house, an infant chasing a four-legged turtle; he is a husband in a middle-class house in Turin, and a bohemian in a Parisian attic; a teenager punched by his father in a holiday house, and a young university student sleeping on just a mattress; and then, he is simply a man, shutting the door of an empty house behind him. In the vein of Richard Powers o di Olga Tokarczuk, Andrea Bajani plays with the apparent silence of the houses to tell the stories that form the profound essence of life. Andrea Bajani (1975) published Cordiali saluti (2005 and 2008), Se consideri le colpe ( latest edition Super ET 2016, Super Mondello prize, Brancati prize, Recanati prize), Domani niente scuola (2008), Ogni promessa (2010); Bagutta prize, ET writers 2016), Presente (with Michela Murgia, Paolo Nori and Giorgio Vasta; 2012), La vita non è in ordine al alfabetico (2014 and 2015), Un bene al mondo (2016 and 2018) and the collections of poems Promemoria (2017) and Dimora naturale (2020), all for Einaudi. With Feltrinelli he published Mi riconosci (2013), the audiodrama La gentile clientela (2013). He is the author of several plays: Miserabili, with Marco Paolini, and 18mila giorni, Il Pitone, with Giuseppe Battiston and Gianmaria Testa. He collaborates with newspapers and magazines. His novels are translated into many languages. He is currently a writer in residence at Rice University in Houston, Texas.