L’anima nera

The restlessness of the twentieth century in a novel

Samuele Israeli is a young man of Jewish origin hopeful and fury, who seeks the way to happiness in the years of the post First World War period. He emerges from the creeping civil conflict between fascists and red proletarians in the Po Valley and he to go and catch his life first in the Paris of the 1920s, then in the post-Great Depression New York. He is a barber, wherever he goes, like his parents, and he is chased by a friend who would like him to be at his side in a game greater than their own life’s, as well as by the desperate love for a woman that cannot have. With the outbreak of the Second World War, their destinies are fulfilled in Libya. Samuele returns to an unrecognizable Italy, going up the peninsula in the days of the apocalypse, until he finds his mother in his birthplace. He has always wish to stay out of it, but History has inexorably sucked him in.