Alessandro Piperno
Con Le Peggiori Intenzioni

It's easy to say that the category of "Beauty" can be applied objectively. That there's a supposed threshold beyond which anyone can find pleasure in contemplating a work of art. I remember when a few years ago I watched "About Schmidt," a celebrated film by Alexander Payne, who I had learned to love for Sideways: In Viaggio Con Jack. Well, a good Jack Nicholson (one of my favorite actors), set in a film undoubtedly well-directed, with an excellent screenplay and some original ideas: technically, nothing to complain about. However, a crucial point escapes: what did the excited young man in full hormonal explosion care about a film on the crisis of old age? Zero identification, zero emotion: postponed to September (a bit like me in sophomore year of high school). With this, I don't want to hide behind the worn-out Latin wisdom of "de gustibus," nor do I want to make an apology that I think has already been seen for every relativist current of thought: I simply want to say that in life it happens to everyone to read a book, watch a movie, or listen to a song that is somehow their book, their movie, their song. In short, one finds oneself in a mental state where one not only identifies but immerses completely in the work, universally assimilating it, internalizing it, creating an indissoluble syncretism between author, protagonist, and real person.

Here it is: "With the Worst Intentions" by Alessandro Piperno was my book. This means more to me than the triumphal reception it received upon release in 2005, when Piperno was just a virtuosic but also onanistic contributor to the Corriere, more than the good public success, more than some scattered positive judgments available online. I don't intend to lay out an extremist apology: if you are "traditional" readers, if you're interested in the plot, the storyline, you'll find this book a useless desecration of a few dozen woods spread across some remote region. If you are familiar with 20th-century Jewish writing, which it evidently imitates, you'll probably find it a poor copy of Richler, Roth, or Bellow. At best, you'll find it a masturbatory display of vocabulary and writing skills, but emotionally emptier than a Dream Theater solo. But there's a but. If you have frequented that haughty, kitsch society full of trinkets and glitter; if you've lost yourself in those unreachable  sea breeze-colored eyes, and have sailed through them by sight for years, even if only because the thought of never seeing them again was even more frightening and painful than looking at them; if you too have found over the years a certain self-satisfaction in recalling an adolescence spent searching for the intangible... then, you will manage to go beneath the artificial and redundant layer of Pipernian syntax, and you will feel moved just like back in the day.

Then, I'll agree with many of the criticisms you'll make: caricatured characters, caricatured situations, even caricatured writing. It doesn't matter: removing the (more negligible than one would read in criticisms) Jewish component and smoothing certain excessive or parodic angles, reading in fine style the tribulations - or rather, the disenchanted retrospective analysis of his adolescent tribulations - of Daniel Sonnino was like watching my adolescence in HD. And if you can, believe me: above all, I found it an honest book.