For the next Literary Tea event, the book chosen is
L'immense distraction, by Marcello Fois
See you on December 9th
Painting the fresco of a twentieth-century dynasty founded on flesh and lies, Marcello Fois gives us a simply majestic novel. Because living, perhaps, is nothing more than an immense distraction from dying.
"Fois, a saga where wealth and family are intertwined." - Fabrizio Ottaviani, Il Giornale

"Ettore Manfredini, despite having just died, on the morning of February 21, 2017, had the distinct sensation of waking up." Thus begins Marcello Fois's new book, which returns to the great family romance, this time in a mythical and very real Emilia, made up of fields, farms, industries, and endless plains. For a moment spanning almost three hundred pages, Ettore retraces the decisive moments, the great joys and sorrows of his lineage. And finally he sees everyone for what they really were. The Manfredinis transformed a simple slaughterhouse into an empire, with the relentlessness of those who know poverty and the cunning of those who have understood how to escape it. But everything about them, their relentless interplay of emotions, alliances, silences, and power, is based on deception. This is what the Manfredinis are: ruthless, deeply human. Come and meet them.
It's a dawn like all the others, only a little longer, when Ettore Manfredini wakes up freshly dead in the house next to the slaughterhouse that was the center of his life, and whose every groan, every creak, he knows. Born too poor to afford a regular education, employed as a boy in the kosher slaughterhouse he will take over after the racial laws, Ettore is a man destined for success: he will become one of the greatest entrepreneurs in Emilia, balancing large-scale industry and peasant traditions. And on this livid dawn of February 21, 2017, as the day of reckoning comes, Ettore realizes he must delve deep into his memories. This is where the whirlwind story of the Manfredini family begins. Which is first and foremost the story of Ettore, but also of his mother, Elda, on whose unscrupulous opacity their entire fortune rests, and of his wife, Marida, saved from deportation but at a very high price, and of Carlo, the eldest, a son never fully understood, and of Enrica, the true mastermind behind the company's growth, and of Elio, his beloved grandson, and of Ester, who becomes entangled in the armed struggle, of Edvige, of Lucia... Marcello Fois's new novel is an extraordinary machine of memory, in which the grand design of history blends with small, crucial details: the taste of a donut eaten eighty years earlier, the perpetually broken shutter in the family home, two old armchairs on which the destinies of all of them were decided. And then the photo of two twins in Auschwitz found by chance in an encyclopedia.