Le Case del malcontento

In the raw heart of Maremma there’s an ancient village, and its name is Le Case. It’s a ghost town, a provincial hole that drags you in and keeps you captive, a microcosm of characters dragging themselves in a vortex of dull days – until the community is shaken by the arrival of Samuele Radi, who was born in the village but had managed to escape it. His return is the spark that gives life and fire to this incredible coral novel: the story of a town where everyone lives and dies alone, with their waste, their expectations, their secret passions, their games of love and death.

 In Le Case, humanity is shown at its most ancestral, obscene nature, it’s almost hard to watch. But it is indeed there, as in all of us – the darkness. Each character has its own voice, a retelling of many sides of the same story, details and intentions intertwining in mixed, obscure patterns, until they clash after years and pages of silent co-existence. Le Case preserves within itself unimaginable secrets, buried bodies, regrets, disdain, fortunes lost, revenge, conversations with God, sons sold at auction, superstitions, betrayals, refuge, a secret kind of joy for other’s disgrace – sometimes, life.

 Sometimes, even love.

With a vernacular yet classical, literary language, and multiple points of view, Sasha Naspini creates a powerful novel, an epic rural tale with a universal echo. The novel plays with genres, mixing noir, psychological thriller, historical memoir and dark fairy-tale. Its passionate, extremely sophisticated story-telling and unforgettable characterization makes it a psychological masterpiece, an analysis on the complexity of human nature – the title has been compared to The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, and Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.

It was published by E/O in 2018, and rights are sold in China (Bejing Creative Art Times), Korea (Minumsa), Greece (Patakis) and Turkey (Cumartesi). Here in Italy it was received with amazing praise (I am attaching an extensive list of quotes below) by the press and public alike, and tv rights were sold to Jean Vigo.