La ricreazione è finita

Marcello is a thirty-something without a real job, resisting his girlfriend’s attempts to strengthen their relationship and trying to prolong his post-adolescent state ad libitum. His only certainty is that he wants to branch out and not end up like his father, in charge of the family bar. In the spirit of contradiction, he takes part in a doctoral competition in literature and unexpectedly wins the scholarship. He thus entered the academic world and his professor, a baron called Sacrosanti, entrusted him with a thesis on Tito Sella of Viareggio, a terrorist who soon ended up in prison and died in prison, where he was able to complete some writings, including the Agiografie infami, and where he is said to have written La Fantasima, the alleged autobiography that has never been found. The study of Sella’s life and work creates in him a kind of identification, a deep empathy with the terrorist writer: he is struck by the personal, rather than social, nature of his despair. At the same time, he experiences the university from the inside: the intrigues, the power struggles between cliques and the specious ideological contrasts, how a career in the university works, even how a ‘scientific’ article is written and how it is evaluated. Thus the references to Tito Sella’s life and literature multiply, invented but ironically reconstructed down to the smallest detail; and while the sarcastic description of university life continues, the story enters Marcello’s everyday life and his vitellonesque Viareggio friendships. Overlapping realities in which suspended truths are revealed as twists and turns. What does the Sella archive, kept at the National Library in Paris, contain? Why does the old luminary Sacrosanti take an interest in a terrorist and obscure writer? And what, if anything, does La Fantasima, the lost autobiography, tell us? Recreation is Over is a work that lends itself to multiple meanings and interpretations. It is a narrative in which the genre of the university novel – set in the artificial and oxymoronic world of the academy – is overlaid with the novel of formation; the rambling amusement about the lost days of a provincial generation with the daring and penetrating reflection on the figure of the terrorist; and the novel within the novel, where the author gives way to the autobiography of his character. This book tells the story of two unfulfilled adolescents, very different and yet with their own awkward symmetry.