{:en}PRESS RELEASE (08/21/2017)
Tuesday, August 22, a Loano, Francesco Recami will be the guest of the sixth edition of the review Culture Tuesdays organized by the’Department of Tourism, Culture and Sports of the City of Loano in collaboration with Event Size e Mondadori Bookstore Loano.
In the’Summer Arena Prince's Garden, to the 6 p.m., the Tuscan writer and novelist will present his latest work “Black Comedy No. 1” (Sellerio, 2017), a satire of social mores in which the author reverses male and female stereotypes, kicking off a new series, ruthless and bittersweet.
Leading the meeting will be Graziella Frasca Gallo, accompanied by the musical notes performed by Maestro Roberto Sinito.
Synopsis
An oppressive marital bond, a double bind, a psychological imprisonment that inevitably turns into a real prison from which the only possible escape is crime. The story told in this novel could be à la Patricia Highsmith, an anguished relationship running inextricably toward the abyss that awaits. Only Recami makes it a black comedy, in which one mocks death because one fears it, until it is mocking death that mocks everyone.
The couple: Antonio Maria Cotroneo, owner of a well-established family tailoring business, and Maria Antoinette, a bursting beauty admired by all. But that was during the engagement. Then marriage; and the course of mutual relations drives him to bury himself in the house and her to exercise an increasingly absolute, almost sadistic tyranny: like a female family mistreatment. Powerful, manly rational and violent, defiantly unfaithful, ready to close every glimmer of life in a claustrophobic one-sidedness, that of the husband, while she, the wife, is engaged in a rewarding or even prestigious professional life. In this paradoxical reversal of masculine and feminine stereotypes of a bad marriage, what can Antonio Maria do? A man «torn, dimidiated, divided, between a thinking and rational being and an emotional and gripped by fear,» he devises first escapes, then petty revenge, and finally homicidal, exorbitantly brainy and failed schemes as much as those of the cartoon Coyote with whom he loves to identify. But what happens to tease death?
With Black comedy no. 1 Francesco Recami begins a cycle centered on the most current social nightmares, with a narrative structure to boulevardier theater, to mundane comedy, to amuse, that is, literally to deflect their ghosts, to deform them through the comedy of misunderstanding and the paradox of the reversal of the good with the bad
Francesco Recami (Florence, 1956). After initial experience editing popular texts and mountain guides, he made his debut as a children's writer with the novels “Assassinio nel paleolitico” (Mondadori, 1996) and “Trappola nella neve” (Le Monnier, 2001). In 2006 he began working with the publishing house Sellerio, with which he published “L'errore di Platini,” “Il correttore di bozze” (2007) and “Il superstizioso” (2008), with which he entered the five finalist list of the Campiello Prize. In 2009 he published “The Boy Who Read Maigret,” which earned him the Tuscan Writer's Prize, while a year later “Take Care of Me” was published, which entered the pre-finalist dozen of the Strega Prize and was also selected for the Castiglioncello Prize and the Capalbio Prize. This was followed by” La casa di ringhiera” (2011), “The Skeletons in the Closet” (2012), “Angela's Secret” (2013), and “The Kakoiannis-Sforza Case” (2014). In 2015 he published “The Man with the Suitcase” and the short story collection “Small Encyclopedia of Obsessions,” which won the Chiara Prize. From 2016 is “Death of a Former Upholsterer.”{:}
