L’immensa distrazione

‘Ettore Manfredini, despite having only just died, had the distinct sensation of waking up on the morning of 21 February 2017.’ Thus begins Marcello Fois’s new book, in which he returns to the grand family saga, this time set in a mythical yet very real Emilia, made up of fields, livestock farms, factories and endless plains. For a moment spanning almost three hundred pages, Ettore looks back over the decisive moments, the great joys and the great sorrows of his family line. And at last he sees everyone as they truly were. The Manfredinis have transformed a simple abattoir into an empire, with the tenacity of those who know poverty and the cunning of those who have realised how to escape it. But everything about them is founded on deception. This is what the Manfredinis are: ruthless, yet all too human. It is a dawn just like any other, only a little longer, the one in which Ettore Manfredini wakes up, having just died, in the house next to the slaughterhouse that was the centre of his life and of which he knows every groan, every creak. Born too poor to afford a proper education, employed as a boy in the kosher slaughterhouse which he would take over following the racial laws, Ettore is a man destined for success: he will become one of Emilia’s greatest entrepreneurs, straddling the line between big industry and rural traditions. And on this bleak dawn of 21 February 2017, as the moment of reckoning arrives, Ettore realises he must walk the length of the corridor of his memories. This is where the whirlwind story of the Manfredini family begins. It is first and foremost the story of Ettore, but also of his mother Elda, upon whose unscrupulous opacity their entire fortune is built; of his wife Marida, saved from deportation but at a very high price; of Carlo, the eldest son, a child never fully understood; and of Enrica, the true driving force behind the company’s growth, and of Elio, the much-loved grandson, and of Ester, who becomes entangled in the armed struggle… Marcello Fois’s new novel is an extraordinary machine of memory, in which the grand design of History intertwines with small yet fundamental details: the taste of a doughnut eaten eighty years earlier, the perpetually broken shutter in the family home, two old armchairs upon which the fates of all of them were decided. By painting a portrait of a twentieth-century dynasty founded on flesh and lies, Marcello Fois presents us with a novel that is quite simply majestic.