Author:
Fabio Genovesi
Publishing house:
Mondadori
Date of publication:
05-9-2017
The Sea Where You Don’t Touch is read in one breath and remains forever in the heart, along with the unique voice of the narrator, a boy with a head full of questions and a heart overflowing with stories. Fabio is six years old, two parents, and nine grandparents. Nine, because he is the only child in the Mancini family, and his real grandfather’s many siblings-lonely, impetuous, and dangerously eccentric men-contend to take him hunting, fishing, and involve him in a thousand other very unchildlike activities. So Fabio grows up without hanging out with his peers, and the first day of school will be a concentration of shocking surprises: his classmates have many toys and very few grandparents, and they amuse each other with strange games with absurd names – hide-and-seek, flag-stealing, midget. And finally, the most alarming discovery of all, a terrible curse hangs over his family: all males who make it to forty without marrying go insane. His grandparents-uncles are there to testify to that. Fortunately, beside him are also a taciturn but loving father, mother, grandmother, and a very wise little girl who goes around dressed as a ladybug. A chaotic family that seems invincible, until something totally unexpected happens and upsets every balance. Day after day, from elementary through middle school, Fabio will seek the ever precarious balance between a private world populated with stories, full of adventure and animated with imagination, and the world out there, confined in a thousand oppressive rules and dominated by the law of the fittest. Amid stumbles, sudden loves, and extraordinary encounters, in a rambling, poetic, and wacky coming-of-age journey, Fabio will realize that oddities are our inexhaustible treasure of uniqueness, and he will come to discover his own vocation as a storyteller hopelessly in love with life.