In the Italy of the end

Review of Paolo di Paolo’s book “Where Were You All?”, by Stavroula Papaspyrou in Kyriakatiki Eleftherotypia. Like a cruise ship. This is how Italy in the Berlusconi years appears through the eyes of Paolo di Paolo’s fictional alter ego in ‘Where Were You All?’, which has just been published in a translation by Antaios Chrysostomidis, launching the ‘Ikaros’ foreign series.It was against this backdrop that the 30-year-old Italian author had the misfortune to come of age, and from this vast void, with which his generation was confronted, he was destined to draw inspiration for his debut novel. Indeed, one of the first to publicly praise *Where Were You All?* was Antonio Tabucchi, may he rest in peace, noting in his two-page review in *La Repubblica* that Di Paolo, ‘with the talent of a born storyteller’, essentially speaks ‘of the end of a regime, of the melancholy it leaves in the soul of anyone who lived through it, of the twilight (or darkness) we traversed, of the desolate landscape of the day after’...The cover of the Greek edition, featuring the jigsaw puzzle designed by Christos Kourtoglou, foreshadows the form of the content. In its place, however, a painting by Robert Rauschenberg could well have been used, as the apparent disorder that characterises the American artist’s work, the scattered notes and disparate materials he employed for his visual compositions, had a catalytic influence on Di Paolo, as he himself admits, feeding him with ‘thoughts, experiments and modes of writing’.  On a superficial level, the story that unfolds here is that of a rather ordinary family, the Tramontanas, beginning on the day when the narrator’s father, a recently retired secondary school teacher, deliberately runs over –— as if taking revenge for all those unruly pupils at the back of the class who had driven him to distraction throughout his career. ‘Secondary school teachers counted for less than nothing,’ we read. Their status, and not just because of their low salaries, “was no longer a badge of honour”. It no longer conferred either prestige or authority, hence the contempt they received from parents.The victim, as will soon be revealed, is the boy who has stolen the heart of Tramontana’s young daughter, but also the ‘snitch’ who has spread the latter’s gossip. Something that will prompt Mrs Tramontana to stage her own rebellion and set off for Berlin, depriving the rest of the family of those... magical mechanisms that kept everything from the furniture to their underwear spotless and ensured they had a hot meal even at the most ungodly hours. At the same time, Mr Tramontana struggles to find a publisher for the book he has spent a lifetime waiting to write, whilst his son, a student of Modern History, is desperately seeking a supervisor for a dissertation under the general title ‘Berlusconi’, in which he aspires to analyse ‘the most comprehensive expression of politics in the postmodern era’. And while the former falls into the trap of a charlatan exploiting the masses, the latter will gather his material like an ant, even if it is not destined to be utilised scientifically, but rather in a novel.In ‘Where Were You All?’, Paolo di Paolo weaves into the main body of his narrative everything from photographs and comics to newspaper front pages, constantly building bridges between the present, the past, the public and the private, whilst at the heart of his book he offers us the most profound overview of the decade just passed by his characters, and by us too. A page with dozens of handwritten words jumbled together, like slogans. Here are a few: Fear. Terrorism. Harry Potter. MTV. Viagra. Wikipedia. Vampires. Genoa. SMS. Big Brother. Global warming. Facebook. Pandemic. Happy hour. Economic crisis. And Berlusconi, of course. The Italian author writes about his own apolitical generation and his country, which has succumbed to vulgarity, but the decline of political and moral values, the ideological confusion, the crisis in institutions such as the family and education, and the lack of role models—which he, in his own way, denounces—concern far more people. It remains to be seen what reception the Greek public will give him. In Italy, however, he has swept the board in terms of both sales and honours, whilst his new novel has earned him a nomination for Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega.Stavroula Papaspyrou | 14 July 2013 | Sunday Eleftherotypia Paolo di Paolo will be in Athens on Tuesday 29 October, at 8.30 pm in Athens, at the IANOS bookshop, where he will be in conversation with Antaios Chrysostomidis. (IANOS, 24 Stadiou Street, Athens)