Per rabbia o per amore
The anthology Per rabbia o per amore. Lo sport in dodici racconti includes the short story L’ora migliore - Cecchino Romanoni, tennista e disertore.
Work
Il laureando
In Italy, there is an archive of true stories of university students who lie to everyone about their academic careers, even inviting them all to a graduation that does not exist. They find themselves facing a system of lies so complex that they can no longer control it. The young Livio Maiorano is a mosaic of these countless stories. As in the real ones, he keeps the fiction going until the last possible moment, until everything collapses and all that remains is to search for the opening where, perhaps, salvation lies.
Il laureando is an admirable debut, profound and illuminating. It captures one of the greatest dramas of our time and strips it of the exceptional nature and otherness we tend to attribute to it so as not to feel implicated. Yet whether it is our studies, family, work or the idea of “home”, we are all intoxicated by that same poison, which leaves us confused, stuck, undefined; always becoming, never having become.
Raise your hand if, in at least one area of life, you have never been Livio Maiorano. Raise your hand if you are certain you truly want it: that suffix of fulfilled things, which seems to be everyone’s goal but no one’s dream.
The ending of Amendola’s book is open; it offers no message, and that is its strength, alongside the lucid, clear writing. But to all the young people going through something similar, one thing can be said: nothing matters more than your life, your peace of mind, not even your degree. Try to open up, to talk about it: if what frightens you is what remains unsaid, then try telling someone.
There is great tenderness in this novel of the periphery.
The Italian periphery, the attempts to escape it or the pressures that force people back, the disappointments of the metropolis have rightly become a highly prolific literary theme. Here the protagonist is Livio Maiorano, and the setting is a beautiful, plundered Calabria, but also Pisa and Versilia. A story about promises made, broken and kept, by oneself and by others. “Do you know what the truth is?”, reads the epigraph. “We would like to fall in love and not fall ill.”
Il laureando speaks of the rituals of an affluent, suffocating province, of those who have set out along the right tracks and cannot lose their way looking back at those left behind, and of the deepest unease, the hidden parts of ourselves. The parts that, if we brought them out, if we admitted them to those we love, we are certain would strip pieces of skin from us. But sometimes only when we are naked is the future visible.
Interview with Silvia Nucini for the podcast Voce ai libri, Chora Media.
Listen to the interview (in Italian)
Forthcoming
A contribution entitled Screenwriting doubt in Corneliu Porumboiu for the volume The Works of the Romanian Screenwriters, forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
Oh, right. Film and television.
He also writes for film and television, where rolling up your sleeves is a permanent activity. Depending on the moment: writing, rewriting, waiting for a reply or checking whether everything has changed in the meantime. These days, he just leaves his sleeves rolled up.
He works with production companies in Italy and abroad.
He co-wrote Babylon Sisters, directed by Gigi Roccati (Ticofilm and AntiTalent, 2017). He was a finalist for the Premio Solinas with the film treatment that later became the novel, and was selected for TorinoFilmLab’s SeriesLab and TFL Extended: Veneto Writing Lab, the Series Mania Writers Campus in Lille and CannesFilms Unlimited.
Open to sharing a writers’ room or thinking through a story that is still finding its form. If you have one, feel free to tell your story. His sleeves are ready.