Books
17 January 2025

Fatiche d’amore perdute

by Cherchi, Grazia
Fatiche d’amore perdute

Is it still possible to fight together for something, maybe for the last time, and to have a shred of hope? If so, for what? Grazia, the autobiographical narrator of this novel, borrows a country house for one weekend and asks these questions to nine of her old friends. They haven’t seen each other for 25 years, from the 68’s, and their lives have changed. Without any kind of time limits, Grazia asks to each of them to narrate loves, jobs, successes and mistakes of their lives. With a lightness full of witty and funny observations, that often become lapidary aphorisms, the balance of a generation is staged, its struggles, its waste of ideas, its long chain of historical, cultural, political failures of the left wing. “How can I take seriously my unhappiness?”, someone asks himself. And another one glosses: “They have stolen our past, and even our words to narrate it”. We must “take note that everything we believed in and we loved has disappeared. Passions, or rather love labors, lost forever!” Playing with genres and quotations (there is even a locked studio, which since always houses only pictures of dying people), Grazia Cherchi rewrites in a completely Italian way Kasdan’s The Big Chill, without nostalgia or indulgence, but with the intelligence and humor of a Woody Allen born in Italy, and she chooses the same title of a Shakespearian comedy, bitter but necessary. First published in 1993, few months before the arrival of Silvio Berlusconi in the political Italian scene, Fatiche d’amore perdute (Lost’s Labor’s Love) is a testamentary account of the end of the last century, to be read in order to say, at the end, with no regrets and with a sense of liberation, that “now past is really past”.

  • Publishing house Minimum Fax
  • Year of publication 2023
  • Number of pages 158
  • ISBN 9788833894621
  • Foreign Rights Tiziana Bello tiziana@minimumfax.com
  • Price 14.00

Cherchi, Grazia

Grazia Cherchi (1937-1995) was a writer, a journalist, an editor and co-founder of the review Quaderni Piacentini, together with Piergiorgio Bellocchio. In addition to this novel she published a collection of short stories, Basta poco per sentirsi soli. In 2017 minimum fax published her collection of essays, articles and interviews Scompartimento per lettori e taciturni.

Fatiche d’amore perdute
treccani

Register on the Treccani Portal

To keep up to date with the latest news from newitalianbooks