Where Were You All, by Paolo di Paolo

This week sees the release of the first book in the new series of foreign fiction we are launching this year. It is very important to us that this launch coincides with the celebration of Ikaros’s 70th anniversary this year. Paolo di Paolo’s book is the first in a series that we hope will offer something new to our readership. For our part, we have done everything in our power, beyond the selection of the texts, to ensure that a high-quality book reaches the reader: reputable translators and proofreaders, and covers designed by the talented Christos Kourtoglou.Paolo Di Paolo’s novel, Where Were You All (translated by Antaios Chrysostomidis), tells the story of a family. The father, a professor approaching retirement, gives a lift in his car to the worst pupil in the class. The mother attempts the first escape of her life. The daughter tries to navigate the complexities of romance through harmless flirtations. And the son, the book’s narrator, is studying History and wants to write his thesis on Berlusconi, the only prime minister his generation has known. The story, then, of a family that is at once the story of a country and the story of a generation – a nameless generation seeking to find its way in a society without principles.This is a contemporary, original novel that describes, satirises, scoffs, mourns and rebels, but above all attempts to give a name to the confusion of our times.Where Were You All? won the 2012 Modello Prize, the 2012 Vitorini Siracusa Prize and was shortlisted for the 2012 Giocavolante Prize.Here is a selection of reviews published in the Italian press: Antonio Tabucchi – La Repubblica: Di Paolo’s novel is not so much a novel about the Berlusconi regime as it is about the end of a regime, about the melancholy it leaves in the soul of anyone who lived through it, about the twilight (or darkness) we traversed, and the desolate landscape of the day after. But the novel is not just that. It also has an entertaining story that is a pleasure to read. It is a novel that could appear minimalist but is not, that could appear to be a coming-of-age novel but is not, that could appear autobiographical but is not. [...] But that is not the reason why the young protagonist does not, in the end, write his dissertation on Berlusconi. The truth is that Berlusconism is a ‘void’, a black hole, and no one can write a dissertation on a void: the void cannot be interpreted; it eludes all interpretation. *Where Were You All* (just like that, without a question mark) is the thesis on the void of two decades that Professor Tramontana’s son failed to write for his university degree. But Paolo di Paolo has managed to recount it in a novel, giving it weight and significance, with the talent of a born storyteller.Ermanno Paccagnini - Corriere della Sera: As for Paolo di Paolo’s *Where Were You All?*, the simple label of ‘novel’ may seem restrictive, although the description certainly fits. I think, however, that the term ‘combine writing’ would suit it better, paraphrasing the ‘combine painting’ of Rauschenberg, the painter who, as he himself mentions, captivated the author [...] Di Paolo’s skill lies in the fact that, apart from offering elegant prose, he has the ability to transform references to the historical past and the contradictions of the present into literature. A present day that is presented as a very meagre ‘legacy’, but which calls on us to ‘remain vigilant’. Above all: to “try to remain vigilant”. Francesco Romanetti – Il Mattino: Di Paolo’s novel is not a “political” novel. Or rather: it is political only because it connects and contextualises (even with photographs, newspaper front pages, summary tables, and comics inserted between chapters) the personal stories it narrates. On the other hand, if one considers it carefully, in this way the political and moral perspective on this degraded historical period proves to be more demythologising and ruthless. Sooner or later – there is no doubt – once we have passed through this period of decline, we will ask ourselves how it was possible, where we all were. Filippo La Porta – 24 ore: The novel is born of a passion – and a challenge: to understand how public history intersects with private history. The most inspired pages are those where the author reaches the conclusion (a conclusion reminiscent of Tolstoy or Manzoni) that there is a dimension more real than that of History, even if it leaves no traces. For, as he says with almost aphoristic clarity, historians try to find the causes and study the consequences, but between the two ‘the life that exists in between is lost’ [...] Throughout the book, a pulsating j’accuse (I accuse) resounds against the absent fathers, and here I mean fathers as teachers and as figures of authority, capable of providing us with a moral compass. Chiara Valerio – L’Unità: The magic of Di Paolo’s novel lies, in my opinion, in the sincere, heart-rending, funny, tender nostalgia for the present, for the fleeting moment, for that something that ends up beyond the horizon and which it is futile to go looking for. Sergio Pent - La Stampa The story that Di Paolo sketches with passion in this *Where Were You All?* is a jigsaw of unanswered questions – both personal and social. The family history of Italo Tramontana – himself born in 1983 – becomes a public story, a generational problem, like those that concerned – in other eras – the various conflicted characters of Saul Bellow [...] It is a restless, fragmented novel, structured with the absolute awareness that it lacks ‘significant’ themes with which to construct a modern epic, a novel born to find specific points of reference for a generation destined to build on sand.