BOOKS
Available from
february 18th
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Premio Settembrini
2008
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Premio dei lettori
2006
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Premio Hemingway
2003
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Prix du premier roman
2001
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Finalista Premio Strega
1999
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IL CORPO ODIATO - Mondadori / Collana scrittori italiani e stranieri
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At the age of nineteen, Gabriele decides to leave his small village in
the wilds of the central Italian Apennines for a new life in France. His
departure is sudden, and he leaves without saying goodbye to anyone: he
is escaping from the boredom of a middle-class upbringing and a family
unable to understand him. In Paris he finds first a room and then a job
as a shop assistant in a celebrated jewellers on the Avenue Montaigne.
Although he doesn't yet realise it, this is the real beginning of his
journey. A painful, but necessary, voyage of discovery towards the
terrible acceptance of a desire so far from the accepted norms to which
he had previously rigorously adhered: the desire for a perfect body.
This novel is the precise, methodical and implacable diary of a young
man's battle with himself, a struggle against his deepest desires and,
above all, against his "imperfection". The pages of the novel take us
step by step through the consumption of Gabriele's body, constrained to
give up food and endure the torments of extreme physical exercise in an
inevitable vain attempt to accept himself and get closer to the
appearance of the interior image he has of himself. We witness moments
of dark discouragement, anger and even disgust, as well as moments of
pure joy and rediscovered wholeness, too often undermined by an ever
present and inexorable sense of guilt.
Forbidden and upsetting evenings spent at the ThÈatre de la Princesse -
a disco in the Place de la Bastille where Gabriele goes frequently - are
systematically followed by bitter disappointment and long bouts of
isolation in what he calls his "decompression chamber", where he
desperately attempts to find some meaning and a balance that will allow
him to live with his impulses without being overwhelmed and killed.
It is not, however, a struggle against prejudice or social customs. More
simply it is the struggle that each of us faces when we are unable to
really accept and love ourselves, and find a balance between the
opposing forces of happiness and ambition.
With a warrior's determination, unusual honesty and a Franciscan search
for simplicity in language and imagery (a conscious reflection of the
protagonist's anorexia) Nicola Lecca recounts the descent of a demanding
young man who is fiercer with himself than the worst of judges could
ever be. Outside of any agenda or accepted voice, the novel gives us a
complex, vibrant portrait of a young man in search of his self.
HOTEL BORG - Mondadori
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This is the story of five people who will soon happen to come together.
The story mostly takes place in Iceland: an "island of ice", filled with lava, wind and intrepid seagulls which walk the pavements of the capital even when, sometimes, there are passers-by. It takes place in these few streets but, above all, it takes place within the most secret consciousness of each of the protagonists.
Exactly like in a picture by Mirò, this story does not have a prima donna, or even a primo uomo, and all the characters co-exist, sharing the same space, without communicating even when they actually almost touch. Yet there is a thread that links them invisibly. It is a constricting thread, a limit: their human limit. And it is precisely within this inevitable limit that they move and exist together.
For his farewell concert, Alexander Norberg, the famous orchestral conductor, will involve Rebecca Lunardi, a complicated and cynical woman in the twilight of her career, and Marcel Vanut, a youngster made prisoner by unscrupulous parents who profit from the uniqueness of his voice while denying him every freedom.
Two disturbing figures loom over them: Hákon, the secret father of many children and the master in wild living for the youth of Reykjavík, and Oscar, employed in a luxury London hotel, with the sole task of bowing to arriving and departing guests.
Alexander, Rebecca and Marcel, like Hákon and Oscar, will challenge the rules of fate by offering their hopes to the Icelandic darkness: a wintry darkness filled with fog, capable of making every happening mysterious.
GHIACCIOFUOCO - Marsilio editori
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seven women ( a wife, an old lady, a prostitute...) seven short stories that will be written twice. Laura Pariani, in fact, will set each one of her short stories in Sout America, while Nicola Lecca will set them in the North...
CONCERTI SENZA ORCHESTRA - Marsilio editori
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The road Nicola Lecca took to leave his island and face the larger world of the continent was the flight of music. This road is at once steep and fast, solitary and privileged, precluded to those who fear losing themselves toiling in the silence. Up there, where everything sounds final and absolute, where the eyes span freely on the intact beauty of the sky and of the world, where words seem even superfluous, Lecca learned to distinguish that which lasts in time and in memory and that which is simply ephemeral and vain, and once he descended, he tried to evoke it in writing.
He doesn't cry for lost traditions, or for worlds overrun by the horror of modernity - on the contrary - with a steady heart and a touch of pride he tells about the beauty that exists and resists and that he was able to behold.
Everyone knows that interpreting a music score is not simply a question of skill and technique, but requires the unveiling of secret drives, of emotions and feelings, of one's soul and its mysterious torments. Yet the enchantment this brings, the full beauty renewed each time "classical" music remerges from the shadow of time, is what allows us to measure the emptiness that surrounds us, the desert left after the horror, and to give once again breadth to our dreams.
In Concerti senza orchestra there is neither nostalgia nor regret; there is hope that - now that the century is over - we will be able to start to play and listen, to shiver and dream, in other words to live, all over again.
Cesare De Michelis
RITRATTO NOTTURNO - Marsilio editori
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To live or to write, to resist in perfect solitude or to cede to the temptation of encountering the other, to hold our eyes closed to discover the darkness within us or to open them wide onto the vulgarity of the modern world, to taste the aching pleasure of memories or to resign oneself to the oblivion of the present? Anne-Rose has no doubts, she chases the mystery that only art can reveal.
In a dark and autumnal Paris, where the sun is always dim and life is confined behind the bistros' glass windows, Anne-Rose nurtures her dream of eternity in a daily fight against the ephemeral and the superfluous, to capture one by one words that will resist time.
"Only poetry can physically step out from the dream", she confesses fearlessly, in the diary that becomes the only witness of her abstract heroism.
Nicola Lecca created a character that embodies the crisis of modernity at the threshold of the new millennium, he has welcomed the challenge of speaking through a solitary and obstinate woman who confidently gives herself to her only love.
The diary that she leaves behind is a sublime soliloquy charged with faith and enflamed by a passion that consumed her life in order to transcend it.
Cesare De Michelis
HO VISTO TUTTO - Marsilio editori
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Between an experience and its narration there is a threshold, so thin as to invite us to cross it yet so deep as to suggest that we will certainly get lost. In the incorporeal yearning for words, life can only lose every possible meaning, it can only reveal its incongruence.
Nicola Lecca moves carefully along lunar landscapes of northern Europe, chasing the adolescent protagonists and catching them in the precise moment in their lives when the enchantment of childhood is still there but has already been broken, in the emptiness of a silence that absorbs them or in the explosion of a pain that breaks them, in a stunning crescendo.
Ho visto tutto is a sort of circumnavigation of the world to understand the evil that afflicts it, an obstinate reconnoitring along the paths of desolation, a continuous challenge to the impotence of words, to their insignificance.
Cesare De Michelis
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