I had never been there by Vladimiro Bottone

I had never been there of Vladimiro Bottone, edito da Neri Pozza, it is the story of an encounter that will change two entire existences. Lui, Ernesto Aloja, he is a former editor in his sixties; lei, Lena Di Nardo is a thirty-year-old aspiring writer. Ernesto Aloja has spent his entire professional life correcting other people's novels, after giving up on writing about it on his own. He recently returned to Naples, the site of his youthful traumas. Ernesto censors his memory with psychotropic drugs and dating, wearily, two lovers who will never cause him any trouble. This routine is broken by the arrival of a typescript. It is a clearly autobiographical novel, the story of messy and promiscuous experiences.
Instinctively Ernesto would get rid of a text that has the ability to deeply disturb him. He can't help it, however, to meet the author. Lena Di Nardo is a magnetic and disturbing thirty-year-old. A young woman who lives in the Neapolitan hinterland, where he shares the precarious and perspectiveless existence of his own generation.
Ernesto, which has always followed the birth of novels, this time she has the impulse to make a novelist blossom. Thus began their weekly meetings, in the panoramic house where the editor lives alone. Ernesto and Lena's will reveal itself, right away, like a mutual apprenticeship: by Lena to writing techniques, of Ernesto to a world new to him. Both with their own pages, or by being accompanied on his nocturnal raids, Lena leads the editor into a world foreign to him. A world where the disposable sexuality of Lena's peers reigns supreme, consumed during alcohol-fueled club nights, substances and indifference to the sense of limit that has marked Aloja's entire life. The psychological destabilization of the editor, then, is accentuated by strange episodes of which her pupil is the victim. Some stalking; the nighttime ramming of Lena's car; an argument between her and a mysterious girl in the nightclub parking lot; some verbal attacks on his Facebook profile. All this while Aloja's nights begin to be disturbed by a steady stream of anonymous phone calls. Too late, Ernesto has the feeling of having ventured into territories where he had never been. Territories that concern Lena's past, but also the personal one of the editor.
At the bottom of this descent into Hell, a double revelation, as ruthless as any removed truth. Ernesto Aloja can only write about it, finally in first person.

ISBN: 978-88-545-2029-5

Vladimiro Bottone: I had never been there

Pagine: 400

Price: €20,00