La vita in ordine alfabetico

“For a long time, without ever writing a single line, I had this idea to make a kind of Dictionnaire raisonné of my life, also to see what ‘my life’ would come out of it. I was in the kitchen in Guzzano with the computer in front of me, I had written Dictionary of My Life because I didn’t want to lose again this phrase that went through my head from time to time, then I had set out to write a list like: my father’s ties, German cockroaches, bugs, then my ties, grandfather’s one hundred and twenty-four special, my Lancia Dedra, dreams made in Guzzano between 4 and 6 p.m. in a happy time, and so on. That was the list of the first things that came to my mind. It is amazing how much stuff there is in a life (this concept ‘life’ fortunately is as vague a concept as possible, in fact, it is not even a concept, but it is this thing that happens to all of us living). Something comes at you all the time from everywhere, and all these somethings almost always lack the slightest logical infrastructure to harmonize them and make them functional to some kind of destiny. The eventual destiny is perhaps seen in retrospect, having now lost all the junk of which we are happily made.”
Ugo Cornia composes an astonishing sentimental encyclopedia of small and big stories from a mythical province, remote and very close, between improvised heroes and indifferent urgencies. An Emilian novel distilled in alphabetical order, an ironic and unsettling look at the disorder of our lives.