Fabio Stassi, La lettrice Scomparsa (2016)
La Lettrice Scomparsa (The missing reader) is a literary mystery. A book which
contains an entire shelf of good books (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, John Fante, Jorge Amado, Luigi Pirandello, Honoré de Balzac, George Simenon among others), an investigation on fiction and
life, a novel wondering how much life and fiction interfere with each other.
Can fiction help men and women endure life? Can life, real life, make it to a good book page? Can reading a novel be therapeutic?
Fabio Stassi is a writer I truly
appreciate and whom I have already mentioned and reviewed here at FLY HIGH! His
latest novels are set in Rome and deal with fragile characters coping with the
harshness of reality. They are watched and described through the lens of
poetry, music and fiction, which are Stassi’s solid background.
The protagonist is one of my
unlucky colleagues, one who has lost his position after being a temporary teacher in
several different schools for years. Now middle-aged and unemployed, Vince
Corso has to reinvent himself and to find a way to survive. Bibliotherapy is the first thing that comes
to his mind: as a teacher of literature and a book lover, book counseling is an
activity he thinks he can be successful at.