“I started writing the novel in 1998, when I realized that in order to understand the meaning of my existence, I needed to strip myself bare in front of other people. Potentially in front of the whole world, because you’re speaking to the whole world when you write a book. The idea is to enter into communication with humanity, if you understand what I mean.”

While I was making an effort to remember what I was doing in 1998, concluding almost immediately that now 134wasn’t the right time (it had been a crazy and unwittingly sad period), Lorenza explained that her novel was a kind of conte philosophique (those were the words she used) that connected with the existentialist thought and, above all, the themes of Sartre’s Nausea.

“My character, who’s partly autobiographical, is halfway between Roquentin and the Autodidact. The kernel of the novel, the result of the protagonist’s philosophical and personal search, is that the true revelation of being is the incursion and therefore the awareness of absence, which is a category not very dissimilar to Sartrian ennui. In order to convey the sense of otherness, of elsewhereness, in relation to ourselves that defines genuine awareness, I used the stylistic device of telling the story in the second person. The I that is other than oneself, that is absent to oneself, is seen and questioned from the outside. Let’s say, from a place in the consciousness that’s a non-place.”

This has to be a joke, I thought. Now she’s going to confess that she’s pulling my leg. There are some things that nobody – well, almost nobody – can say seriously.

She didn’t confess that she was pulling my leg. So she meant exactly what she had said. She specified that a famous left-wing critic had written these things in an equally famous literary magazine. And that she identified with these “exegetical considerations”.

Then, helped by the wine and the fact that I was listening without interrupting her, she went on with her story.

The novel hadn’t done well, she said, readers hadn’t understood it, and only a thousand copies or a little more had been sold. As she had already told me, the publishing house had gone bust a few years later and the fact that this first novel hadn’t been a commercial success – the only thing 135that really matters today in the book world is sales – made it hard to find a new publisher and get a new contract. That was probably why she hadn’t managed to finish her second novel, which she had started soon after the first one had come out, on a wave of enthusiasm at being published and optimism for the future.