Osvaldo Soriano
Cuentos De Los Años Felices (Pensare con i piedi)

"Cuentos de los años felices", Osvaldo Soriano (Arg) 1993. In Italian "Pensare con i Piedi", published by Einaudi (1995)

Osvaldo Soriano (1944-1997) was an Argentine journalist and writer (and "football lover", in the purest sense, I would add): a fervent supporter of the values of democracy and human rights, for these ideals he suffered private and public ostracism in his homeland, even in the preceding years, culminating in the events that led to the "Dirty War" which forced him, at the height of the Argentine political crisis in 1976, to seek refuge in Europe. Returning to his homeland in 1984, he was immediately recognized as one of the most important and reliable "singers" of the history of the Argentine nation. Endowed with sharp irony, filled with a healthy realistic and realist melancholy, his novels and stories blend a journalistic style, almost like a reporter, with a refined poetic flair that also takes inspiration from small domestic, family, and/or work events. Without forgetting what was his greatest passion: "fútbol".

"Pensare con i Piedi" is one of the works where this passion best blends with the "political" and historical Soriano: 33 stories in which private affairs, "legendary" episodes (some actually happened, others lost in the folds of History and therefore reconstructed by the author's poetry) and Argentine chronicle are sewn together with the common thread of the ball. A romantic and dramatic epic at the same time in which the author dusts off memories for the family (especially the antiPeronist father affectionately called "eternal loser"), childhood and adolescent friendships (with the reverberations of the country's unsettling historical events "albiceleste" as the background) and amusing reconstructions (of a "mythical" football match in particular) teetering between fantasy and realism. 

Divided into three distinct parts (the first two more personal, the third more general: the Italian translators chose the name of this third to title the entire Italian version) "Cuentos de los años felices" is an act of love towards memory that "magnifies everything" and a clever way to oppose, once again, and even more, any form of totalitarianism: always with a nostalgic vein that Soriano never wanted to hide.