The Refusal

Descrizione

Eight short stories, often built on dialogue, which tell about various aspects of life in today’s world, its contradictions and, above all, the difficult quest for new values.

The tale “The Refusal”, which this short collection is named after, was written in the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers: the episode is present in watermark, it could be any other situation of war and violence to which, unfortunately, we are too accustomed nowadays, but that people cannot accept, because the normality is not death, violence or massacre, which make people lose their reference points, as it is also stated in the tale “War”. In an absurd world where the only parameter for evaluation is being efficient at work (as it is ironically stated in “The Zoo” and “The new Managing Director” ), perhaps not everything is lost: there are still stories of love and jealousy (“Annalisa”), natural instinct prevails on rationality (“The Jump”), people try to build new relationships, to find new formulas to love each other and live together: see for example “The Foreigner”, which presents the difficulties, but also the beauty of a relationship between people of two different nationalities and cultures so distant as Italian and Somali, or even “On the edge of the bed”, which describes the formation of a family quite different from the ones we are accustomed to, with the common life of a husband, a wife, the husband’s lover and the two children that the man has had from the two women.