On Sunday, November 30th, starting at 6:30 pm, there will be a double event at the EXME in Nuoro for the 10th edition of December Literary, entrusted to two different yet very similar Sardinian voices: Cristina Caboni and Francesco Abate.
In La rotta delle stelle (Garzanti), Cristina Caboni portrays Marigold, a ballerina at Milan's La Scala whose injury instantly robs her of her imagined future. Her escape to Sicily, her elderly uncle as the family's last holdout, the sea shimmering at dawn, and the song of whales: it is in this landscape that the protagonist hears an impossible sound, a bell rising from the sea, rooted in 1942, when many bells were melted down to make weapons. A family secret, a sound that resurfaces from the depths of history and becomes an opportunity for rebirth. The novel questions how one survives loneliness by opening oneself to new things, without remaining prisoners of the past. The author will be in conversation with Graziella Monni.
At 7.30 pm the baton passes to Francesco Abate with Gli indegni (Einaudi), a journey into the counter-history of the 1980s. Livio, sixteen, runs away barefoot from Cagliari to Florence to listen to Patti Smith . At a concert, he meets the beautiful and elusive Anaïs: from there, a decade of punk and house music, heroin and AIDS, nights in gay clubs, fragile friendships, homes that become refuges for the "unworthy" who refuse to conform to dominant models will begin. Following in Anaïs's footsteps, between Cagliari, Paris, and London, Livio will risk losing himself several times. Abate pays homage to Pier Vittorio Tondelli and to a generation overwhelmed by excess and nascent social climbing. He will be interviewed by journalist Giuseppe Deiana.
"We chose to open this day with two stories that speak beautifully to the theme we've chosen for this year's Literary December: two lives that symbolize those who must relearn how to inhabit themselves," emphasizes Giuditta Sireus, artistic director of the Jane Austen Club Sardinia. "Marigold and Livio are both bodies on the run, and in that escape, we understand what it truly means to have a home. These two novels tell us that inhabiting books means, first and foremost, inhabiting our own wounds."
