Andrea De Carlo, I’ll tell you about love on the border and spirituality

ANDREA DE CARLO, ME, JACK AND GOD (THE SHIP OF THESEUS, PP 381, EURO 20). C.An intense, feverish friendship, always on the edge of a love story. Mila and Jack are only themselves when they are together. They have known each other since childhood, they get lost, they find each other again but the thread that unites them never breaks. The mysterious strength of their bond is told by Andrea De Carlo in his new novel, the twenty-second, ‘I, Jack and God’, which has just arrived in the bookstore for La nave di Teseo.

A third element plays a fundamental role in the book: religion, spirituality which at the beginning is an obstacle, a third inconvenience between the two protagonists.
“It was an opportunity for someone like me who had never done religious studies, to go and read the Bible, the Gospels, to discover everything that is around, the various branches, the conflicts, the translation errors . There are a thousand things to discover and therefore religion has inevitably entered history with great force. Many people who consider sacred texts their reference, their North Star, then know very little about it, for the most part “he says. ‘ANSA De Carlo.
“I got the idea that we are full of questions about the origin of everything, about destiny, about the meaning of things. The most we can do is to push our questions as far as we can, but in the certainty that there are no certain answers. we would never have any “explains the writer who is the son of atheistic parents, but is” by no means a convinced materialist “. Indeed, “living it seems more and more that there are things that we do not decide but that happen due to a set of circumstances, which we call coincidences, but which perhaps are part of mysterious designs”.
Like what happens in this strange journey of Mila, Jack and God. “There is a mystery. Why does one consider the other so special? In a context in which we increasingly tend to think that everything is interchangeable, in which it is as if we were in a huge supermarket where you can draw from the shelves and if something does not work maybe there is another one that is better, the two of them are very convinced of their absolute uniqueness. Mila and Jack are two very different people , but in their difference there is the need to have a continuous exchange “explains De Carlo.
The novel opens with a tragedy in hang gliding where rocker Federico ‘Brusko’ loses his life while Mila hangs in the void, but is saved.
“I always thought that to have a beginning it must have a crisis of some kind. In this case she is upset, she happens not only to be almost a victim of this tragedy but to be even accused. There is a search for goats. expiatory in front of such a traumatic episode. And if it concerns a popular character there is even more desire to find a culprit. Mila has a double trauma “says the writer.
Structured like a diary, that of Mila, this highly successful and engaging novel takes us into the heart of a woman. “It is as if it were she who speaks to a possible interlocutor, but in the end she talks with herself. I lived the whole story within her, it was not just a narrative device for me. It is a challenge to enter a female voice. . In these two years in which I worked on this novel, it was her. I abandoned my usual self. It is the beauty of the novel, not only of writing it but of reading it. create self-referenced micro universes that now dominate the world through social pages full of billions of images or thoughts that are frighteningly similar to each other in their belief that they are unique “explains the writer concerned about the times we are living in. “A novel can be an escape route or a way of reflecting on some issues that are in the air, perhaps in an indirect way” says the writer who likes the number 22 “it has something special. There is a sense of Completeness. It could also be the last novel I write, I don’t know. I think it every time. And it came out in 2022, there is also this strange coincidence. ” (HANDLE).