Breaktime Is Over

Marcello Gori, a thirty-year-old from Viareggio, is stranded in a state of existential drift, trapped in a kind of endless late adolescence from which he simply cannot break free. After spending the better part of a decade at university, he now hops from one precarious job to another, forever putting off life’s real decisions — including his relationship with Lucrezia, which he keeps sabotaging for fear of stepping into adulthood. While he treads water in this suspended state, something quite unforeseen happens: against all expectations, Marcello wins a doctoral scholarship at the University of Pisa under Professor Sacrosanti, a towering figure of Italian literature and a formidable academic baron. Marcello dreams of drafting a grand, sweeping thesis — one that explores Borges and Unamuno as readers of Don Quixote, or that binds together Gadda, Bolaño and Foster Wallace — but the professor advises him instead to devote himself to a minor Italian writer, Tito Sella, a former terrorist and once-promising author in the early 1980s. As Marcello plunges into his research, Tito gradually becomes a kind of alter ego, and the novel unfolds through the twin narratives of their lives, two worlds that cast a sharp light on Italy’s recent history. Dario Ferrari portrays both the years of terrorism in the country and the contemporary academic sphere with dry, biting humour, sometimes veering into the grotesque, and often coaxing a smile from the reader. Drawing on examples such as Borges and Cervantes, Ferrari also explores the metanarrative with the introduction of Sella’s supposed autobiography Fantasima, a novel within the novel. This is a lost work of doubtful existence that Marcello attempts to piece together from documents preserved in the author’s archives in Paris, retracing his life and the political struggle of the Ravachol brigade of which he was a member.

La ricreazione è finita
Dario Ferrari
Sellerio, 2023