writing
L'ALTRA SETE
Another way to be thirsty
She’s called Alice. She’s 27 years old. They’ve put her in a clinic that has the reassuring name of a Home, but she doesn’t know how long she’s been there. She desperately longs for Luca. Luca who smells good, Luca who holds her by her hips, Luca who laughs. But all that she can see is her mother’s glacial gaze. Along with the searching looks of her therapist, who never stops asking her questions. Because diabetes, the doctor says over and over again, is not a disease, it’s a condition. You have to learn to recognize the tremors, the tingling sensation on the tongue and legs, be ready to inject yourself, load the small black glycemia pen, as if it were a gun, and shoot. Alice can’t fathom how, at her age, she can get used to the idea that she doesn’t produce enough insulin, because first of all she has to deal with Luca’s absence. Luca who was driving, Luca who isn’t here - to understand how to live with an absence that, inevitably, is an addiction.
Selected to represent Italy
at the Festival Européen du Premier Roman , Kiel 2016.
UNA VITA A POSTO
A life for good​
Sertraline is the only drug that saves Giovanni Guicciardi, aka Andrea Riis, failed writer and amateur painter, from the boredom of a middle age without passion and without surprises. His wife Lisa fights against the passing of time treading the boards all over Italy, accepting small roles in some tv series of no importance, and demanding sex from her husband with methodical regularity. Nothing seems to be able to ripple this placid equilibrium, the matrimonial boredom of a life in which everything has already happened, and what hasn't is condensed into regret. But Andrea feels life still pushing hard inside of him, almost obsessively, towards women that he can only imagine to possess: the realization of every desire seems hard and far away. He can't take it anymore, when he finds the gateway to another dimension, the one in which he finds himself a successful surgeon who realizes people's desires with a scalpel, with a nice apartment, a nice car, and next to Melissa, a fascinating and mysterious creature. And maybe Andrea is not the only one traveling... But is there a way to stay in the other dimension where desires are seemingly fulfilled, and the hours are never all the same? Una vita a posto, Alice Torriani's second novel, investigates the hidden drives, compromises and shortcomings love is a variable of, but of which sex is the key.