“Forget me the day after tomorrow” is Andrea Di Consoli's return to writing. A book about the disenchantments and failures of the middle generation

In full lockdown, Mario Desiati, 2022 Strega prize winner, began to write insistently to Andrea Di Consoli, a writer much loved by those who have a visceral and sentimental idea of literature, so that he would return to writing, after many years of silence. At the beginning Di Consoli withdrew, he didn’t listen to him, he replied that that season was over forever. Then, after a few months, with great surprise, like a river in flood, night after night, this diary was published in public, in which Di Consoli, more exposed than ever, talks about his Lucanian youth, his past and lost loves, his loneliness, of many people and characters encountered in his life, of his peasant parents, of restless love, of his now grown children, of a maturity lived with passion but also with fear, tiredness, surrender. With Forget me the day after tomorrow (Rubbettino) – which will be presented on May 9th at 3pm at the Turin Book Fair with Franco Arminio – Di Consoli has written a book of direct, immodest, confessional pages, which speak of a middle generation without hiding failures and falls, disillusionment and bitterness.

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I will betray Andrea Di Consoli who always wants to start from the end of things and never tires of saying it, shouting it or writing it: «When dying is a natural thought, /life is simply perfect in one /of its rare forms of completeness».

I take the edge of Forget me the day after tomorrow backwards, exactly at the point where things have already happened and are remembered. After all, we emigrated to Rome to be with the poets and writers of our time. Just over twenty years ago, literary magazines were a cheerful and possible horizon for provincial writers who looked with admiration and respect at the authors who wrote in them or simply appeared in the magazines and tambourines. Giulio Einaudi said it better than others in his conversation with Severino Cesari, “publishing is knowledge of men, beauty, the key to this work is that intelligence must be rewarded, which in turn is specific to the relationship with men , as well as texts, is nourished…”, even if men is a word that is almost as limiting as relationships. Over time, words acquire changing nuances. But they are effective in describing the meaning and the underground search that many have of looking for kindred spirits with whom to share the world.

Inspiration can sometimes arise from encounters with others, writers, poets, or even candid boasters. Imagining oneself inside a very smoky café or a room with peeling walls with typewriters and the minutes of a meeting where poetry is discussed was a dream for many of us. Even arguing about Proleterka and the essential prose of Fleur Jaeggy or the new vein of the poet who drove us crazy, Valerio Magrelli, who published In the meat condo.

The new millennium that has just begun was the final era of paper magazines, or at least the era in which magazines were the main training ground, workshop, for those who manufactured their own voice. We met in the editorial offices of New Topics, The stranger e The Illustrated Café and many others looking for the traces of the masters in the new writings and the great intuitions in those of the past. In fact, these were the years in which there were those who distanced themselves from the success of the innovative prose of the writers renamed “cannibals”, and others who instead claimed it in a new formula, but they were always neighborhood reprisals, confrontations and controversies that remained under track, inside the editorial offices or at most an outburst after a presentation at the Melbookstore in Via Nazionale, very far from the storms in the glass of Facebook or some exhausted Telegram group.

Perhaps many of us were Rondists without knowing it, trying to write well while staying on the edges of reality, while others were wilder and a bit neorealists, and they too without knowing it, looking for meaning in the story of contemporary reality, with the spirit of those who were on the threshold of great change. Many anthologies were published to take stock of the new advances, conferences were organized to establish or break the canon, monographs were written on the currents that stood out on the horizon; studies and interventions often in controversy with those of other magazines, other universities, other cities.

In Milan, the conference was born from a reflection by Antonio Moresco, after the attack on the Twin Towers Writing on the Western Front, which also becomes an anthology; Meanwhile, a new generation of Southern writers is establishing itself in Rome and the South. Stile Libero which had launched the “cannibals”, publishes The Deserters with authors in their thirties/forties born and raised under Rome. Besa, a smaller publisher, translates the concept of Einaudi’s anthology more effectively with the title Dirty in the sun. Also in this anthology there are exclusively southern writers…