C’e’ molta speranza (ma nessuna per noi)

H is the protagonist of this story. He is fed up with the pessimism that surrounds him, and also with his own: having arrived in Milan from the Calabrian countryside, he has spent the last few years writing an essay on the end of the world, but history – with its wars, pandemics and various disasters – has provided him with so much material that his work has become obsolete. He therefore decides to change course and focus on something completely different: desires. Ambitious, timid, common, impossible, unmentionable… Armed with a notebook and tape recorder, H asks his friends, family, the partner he would like to marry and everyone he meets a seemingly simple question: “What do you desire most of all?” He is curious to map the hopes of the world, of course, but also to understand himself better; to discover whether his own dreams are hidden among those of others. (Why is it that we desire? Should we relearn how to do so?) C’e’ molta speranza (ma nessuna per noi) (There is a lot of hope (but none for us) is a novel that oscillates between personal essay, investigation and pamphlet, and speaks to all of us, about what we want and how our desires are the only thing truly capable of revealing who we are and the society in which we live. At the centre is a young man who aspires not so much to achieve his goals (finding a stable job, a bigger house, writing a good book…) as to be able to afford them. But the real protagonist, perhaps, is literature, since the only way to relearn how to desire – and to achieve what is materially unachievable – is to imagine.