UPHILL SOMERSAULTS (CAPRIOLE IN SALITA)

Pino Roveredo’s life, as he describes it in this book, was difficult and violent: it is summed up in his birth to deaf and dumb parents; in his “dizziness from his first cigarette”; in his years in the boarding school from which he had to escape; in his addiction to alcohol as a reaction to his meaningless fate; in the madhouse, the last refuge of society’s outcasts, but also a sanctuary for the muffled and unquenchable pain that teaches you that you absolutely must endure; and in prison, which is a separate world, more real than reality itself because of the cruelty it shamelessly displays without being subjected to any moral or social censure. Then the picture changes, however: his life has reached a dead-end, his marriage to Luciana, the woman in the “amazing white satin wedding dress”, is like a barrier between two incompatible ways of life, the slow self-destruction and the possible revival he is breathlessly seeking himself; and when one day he is on the verge of timidly changing his life, and the change is based entirely on willpower, he tells himself: “I have to follow my quick step which now takes me on the straight road.”

Pino Roveredo’s autobiographical narrative has no frills and is distinguished by the “narrator’s” need to tell true things, which, once read, are never forgotten. Because they are pure as he is.