Jack Frusciante E’ Uscito dal Gruppo – Enrico Brizzi

The book every Italian kid born in the 1980s has read in his/her early teens. Single-handedly responsible for my decision to call my mother “Mutter” for the past 15 years and for giving me false hopes about shy girls (in the book they turn out to be loving and sensible, in my teenage years they were just – with the benefit of insight – not really worth my time). It is also partially responsible for my love for cycling around my hometown on my vintage bike (although credit here goes first and foremost to my parents).

The novel is “rock” but it’s not of the calibre of, say, The Buddha of Suburbia – it is “rock” in a provincial and low-profile sort of way. The plot is offensively simple – just a high-school love story – but its appeal for Italian teenagers is absolutely undeniable.

My parents also really enjoyed the book, immediately stating that something was rotten in the state of Denmark (somehow, one of us quotes this line from Hamlet, or “to die, to sleep. To sleep perchance to dream” at least once a week – at times I mockingly tell my wife that “frailty, thy name is woman” but that usually results in a not-so-frail slap on the back of my head). And something was undeniably rotten somewhere, because different generations are not meant to both enjoy a “generation-defining” book, and because Enrico Brizzi never again wrote anything remotely readable.