Ogni coincidenza ha un’anima

The Soul of Coincidence

“My name’s Vince Corso. I’m forty-five years old, an orphan and I make a living prescribing books for people.” A teacher without a stable job but with an undisputed appetite for books, Vince has invented a new job for himself: the bibliotherapist. His house/office is in Via Merulana in the centre of Rome: a studio flat with a loft and corner kitchen where he receives patients better suited to a student from out of town than a soul doctor. And yes, his patients are mostly women. Vince listens to them, then finds them a suitable book to assuage their souls: literature as a balm for the spirit and – why not – for the body as well. One day a beautiful woman in her sixties, Giovanna, approaches him: she has a brother suffering from Alzheimer’s who, in the turmoil of his mind, has for some time been repeating broken phrases—the same ones over and over—without any connection between them. He had once been a renowned scholar and a voracious reader, a lover of languages, a wealthy collector of volumes; those words might be quotations from a novel. “It’s only a hypothesis, but if this book exists, I would very much like to know which one it is. And if you were to find it, I could read it aloud to him, a few pages a day.” The bibliotherapist sets to work, haunted by a question: if you had lost everything and were allowed to save only one memory, which would you choose? He has several riddles to solve, using techniques to decipher and interpret texts, through psychological identification with possible authors, research from library to library, chance and revealing encounters. An adventure that leads him to a solution that proves far less innocent than it first appeared. Meanwhile, he studies the places around him, conducts bibliotherapy sessions with new and unexpected patients, and discovers the hatred that has once again begun to run through neighborhoods and society. It becomes a search within a search, a novel within the novel. For Vince is a walker, an explorer of spaces and people: itineraries, places, and faces that constantly echo back to moments in literature of which he is both victim and accomplice, almost like a happy prisoner. Yet he is driven by an inexhaustible need: to find the boundary line between life and books—and perhaps to cross it—because he is increasingly drawn to the passions, fears, and joys of men and women of flesh and blood.

A book on remembrance, on the importance of memories and on literature as therapy.