Il Saraceno
by Filosa, Vincenzo‘That’s enough talking, I’m sick,’ says Italo Filone, downing the pills he has been taking since he decided to detox from opiates. Saraceno’s magnetic plates, however, show that this grumpy 40-year-old dad – cartoonist and Milanese publishing all-rounder – only feels better if they let him talk. Especially if a brief stay in the town where he grew up, Crotone, forces him to relive the time when, as a child, he discovered that grown-ups don’t know what a secret is worth. Or the time when, at the age of twenty, his eagerness to leave Calabria crashed against two incompatible obsessions: his father’s approval and heroin. Had he not been crushed by guilt, Italo would never have agreed to lend a hand in his father’s restaurant, a grown-up and threatening microcosm. Some time has passed since those summers of inadequacy, but their echoes have not faded. It resurfaces in the clashes between Italo and his wife, in his fierce tirades against the comics audience and his successful colleagues. If Philip Roth’s literary alter egos seem to live within the paradoxical confines of a Jewish joke, Filosa’s is embedded in a dizzying puppet show in which he voices all the roles, because Italo is at once the paladin, the princess and the Saracen pirate: the hero, the victim and the enemy of himself. He knows he will never stop fighting in the mirror, but he does not know how much longer he will be able to stick to the most important choices of his life: being a father, staying sober and making comics, three commitments that require great devotion and pay off very slowly.
- Publishing house Rizzoli Lizard
- Year of publication 2023
- Number of pages 192
- ISBN 9788817159043
- Foreign Rights sonia.finotello@rizzolilibri.it
- Price 18.00
Filosa, Vincenzo
Vincenzo Filosa (1980) has translated great masters such as Jirô Taniguchi and Shigeru Mizuki and is the most authoritative popularizer of alternative Japanese comics in Italy. In 2015, his first book, Viaggio a Tokyo (also released in France), was published to surprising public and critical acclaim, followed by Figlio unico (2017) and Cosma e Mito (with Nicola Zurlo, 2019).