Where does the weight of other people's expectations take us?

Plants grow slowly, following the rhythms that nature has given them since the dawn of time. They are “programmed” to carry out simple but fundamental tasks: taking in carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen, reproducing and providing food to other living beings. They are in no hurry, they do not live in competition. At a certain point in his life, Marco, the protagonist of Nikolaj Prestia’s novel The Conscience of Plants (Marsilio, 2024, pp. 192, also e-book) probably feels he can envy a vegetable. He too has been vegetating for years, surviving but without even the primordial goals of a flower or a shrub. But how did he get to this point? Marco tells us indirectly through the flow of his thoughts a few pages after we met him. After a panic attack, he is admitted to the emergency room. He cannot speak, he is confused, and while the other patients mark the time with their complaints, a psychologist takes care of him by inviting him to retrace his past. Marco has little time, he is in the hospital not by chance or because he felt ill. His partner is about to give birth and our protagonist suddenly feels the weight of many things he has not settled in the past: the pain, the falsehoods and failures collected during his university studies in Siena, a previous relationship that ended in a cruel way. The stream of consciousness in which he immerses himself thanks to the psychologist is punctuated by his last four cigarettes, with the promise, at the end of the story, to stop smoking.

Marco, between one puff and another, then recalls his brilliant university career, up until that exam he failed that gradually transformed into an emotional and social discomfort. To escape the weight of reality, he invented a parallel world made of secrets, lies, fantasies. Until he announced to his father and grandfather, the last survivors of his family, that everything was over, that they could come to Siena to celebrate his long-awaited graduation with him. Only that the evening before the proclamation Marco buys a "tie", new but very particular, one of those ties that are tied high up and that tighten until they strangle you, returning tenfold the sense of suffocation that the young man has felt for years. That evening Marco simply decides to end it all, but in an unpredictable way and taking full responsibility for himself.

Narrated by Nikolai Prestia with an ancient sense of participation and modesty for the emotions and fragilities of the protagonist , “The Conscience of Plants” tells in a sincere and at times crude way the anger of living in an era in which the result is worth more than the path, an era in which speed and appearance are the only parameters with which all of us, more or less consciously, judge the fulfillment of a human being.

Marco is, in fact, a new Zeno Cosini, but without the ineptitude of the Svevo character . A Zeno of the third millennium who, setting himself the goal of quitting smoking and lying to himself and others, tries to build his own future, honestly dealing with all the discomfort of a contemporary youth at constant risk of being crushed by the expectations and excess of love of others.