By Antonio La Cava
Luca Bianchini can talk to an audience. He is not a man of cabaret, nor a mimic comic actor, but a writer with a great (self) irony. He arrived a bit late to the presentation of his latest novel Se domani fara’ bel tempo – If tomorrow’s weather will be nice.
He starts off with a biting air to the audience gathered at the Italian Bookshop: “I guessed the hall was not full, usually when you get to presentations on time there is only a stranger and a few relatives”. But the strangers today are a bit more.
Luca Bianchini came on purpose from his home city Turin to present his latest work. “It is never easy to say what a book is about – Bianchini says – mostly when you are the writer. A story narrates, at the same time, about you and the story itself. The best thing to write it, it is that the story brings you where it wants, and not where you believed to”.
At his third novel, the writer from Turin entertained the audience by telling us how the idea for the new novel arose and about the investigations he did.
Se domani fara’ bel tempo is about a middle-class guy, of his life as a privileged, of his bad habits and transformation.
The writer admits he has been influenced by the story happened to Lapo Elkann, who risked his life during a party based on drugs together with some transsexuals.
The main character of the novel is Leonardo Sala Dugnani, known by everybody as Leon. The initials of his name refer to Lsd. Bianchini tells us how he contacted some different off-springs of the rich family in Northern Italy and how one of them kindly decided to talk about his story.
“The guy is a cliché, and the tragedy is that he knows. He drinks like a fish, sniffs coke throughout the day, obviously he does not work, he knows the outrage but not the courage, he survives in his golden cage with his comics and the telly, and he has a well-off girlfriend, Anita, who has been loving him for too long time, and leaves him in the first page of the novel”.
That is the first great no that Leon gets, able to buy everything by his money, and that will bring him to a slow metamorphosis in a farm in the Tuscany countryside.
The plot, lacking in originality, is made lively by the freshness in its style, typical in Bianchini’s writings that made him famous with his first novels: Istant Love and Ti seguo ogni notte – I follow you every night.
Luca Bianchini, who used to be a copywriter, became famous for the book-interview Eros. Lo giuro, to Eros Ramazzotti, who chose Bianchini to tell his fans about his private life. In his way.
The writer lived for months close to Eros, taking him to the United States for the preparation of the new record and talking to him about every aspect, professional and private, of a life and a career that made famous all around the wolrd the “guy from the outskirts”.
Ironical, self ironic, sometimes obsessed by the show business and its starlettes, Bianchini is a writer loved by the young.
He says to know Tiziano Ferro, Fiorello, Eros Ramazzotti (“Eros sends me many texts, but who doesn’t want to be a famous singer’s friend?”).
Maybe his obsession for vips is the evidence of a generation grown up with the television and for the television, that uses its same language. The style used in his novels, light and frank, makes the reading quite flowing for readers accustomed to watch television.
Behind the ephemeral culture that Bianchini describes, the existential condition of the Italian youth is reflected. And maybe the same Bianchini could be a great character for one of his crackling novels.
Copyright 2007 GIORGIOSTUDIO Ltd – All rights reserved
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