Due - Enrico Brizzi

 

It must be hard to have written one hugely successful book, and follow it up with a list of very uninspiring novels, and Brizzi was just trying to milk (again) the one thing that gave him fame. 

I was expecting/hoping this book would be a sequel covering Aidi and Alex's lives 30 years after their high-school years - that kind of nostalgic operation (kind of like in Trainspotting 2) I could have got behind. 

Instead, this is an immediate sequel of Jack Frusciante E' Uscito dal Gruppo and it just doesn't work for me - Aidi is boring, on a high-school exchange that I look down upon because I am a snob, in a place that I find uninspiring, and the charm of interrail travelling and backpacking like Alex has long lost its appeal for me. 

Still, I'm reasonably happy to have read this because, while this is not a good book by any measure, I liked the original one enough to bring myself to care a bit about its sequel and it was obviously an easy way to pass a day or two during the Christmas holiday. Still, Enrico Brizzi, please, move on...

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.