Panorama

An interrupted correspondence, a woman who has suddenly disappeared, the void left by absence. This is how this novel begins, and through the refined and melancholy voice of Tommaso Pincio, it makes us look at the world, present and future, without any rhetoric, discovering fears and fragility, hopes and disillusions. Everything in this book is a declaration of love: for literature, for reading, for life that always surprises, for the very act of loving. ‘For about four years I had a correspondence with an extraordinary girl. A voracious reader but without any particular literary ambitions, she was full of oddities and suffering but also very charming. Panorama began to take shape when she deactivated her profile without warning. From one day to the next she disappeared from my life and I felt an unexpected emptiness and anguish. After a few weeks I thought that one way of processing this unusual bereavement was to write a story about her but in which I didn’t appear’. This is how Tommaso Pincio told the story, revealing in the reality of personal events the origin of Panorama, published in 2015 by NN Editore and which soon became an editorial success and a cult book. From that personal reality came events and characters of a dizzying story. Then there’s Ottavio Tondi, his obsession with reading as a relentless and marginal reason for living, his special talent ‘in not affecting things’, the conflict with his father, up to the unexpected turning point in his life: meeting the editorial director of an important publishing house, reading manuscript after manuscript, then sudden success, bestsellers, the power to decide the fortune of a novel, literary festivals amidst the adoration of the public and the envy of many. And then there’s Maddalena, with whom Ottavio begins a relationship in which many things coexist, ‘perhaps even love’. And Ligeia, whom he meets on the social network ‘Panorama’, and with whom he exchanges messages for four years. The hours spent in a small car, wandering around the great ring road that surrounds the city, and the silence of an empty and unmade bed, or of replies that don’t come. While time overwhelms and transforms everything, and books become a clandestine and dangerous passion. This new edition also contains the work of one of his characters, Acque chete by Mario Esquilino, which was unavailable for years because it was self-published.