The parable of two brothers united by life but of divergent natures in the book published by Morellini publisher
TEverything seems already written for Osvaldo and Orlando, born on the same day into a wealthy family in Rome. Twins who from birth were destined to walk together and to share their journey as a debut in life to the point that from high school they nicknamed with the letters of the Greek alphabet Omega and Omicron, the title of the new novel by Vito Ribaudo released by Morellini, which sees them protagonists of an unexpected and disappointing destiny. «They were conceived together, they were born and raised in the early years as a single organism in symbiosis. Then the journey of their paths saw them separate, like a drop of oil in a glass of water».
Betraying the promises of what seems to be the natural course of things is a habit that like a gene slips into the walls of the Margi family home where the two brothers grow up. His mother, Manuela, had dreamed of being a magistrate since the time of the Capaci massacre, but “she ended up living like this: the elementary school teacher who sees a moment of authentic refreshment in the cigarette before the morning bell”. Even her husband Mauro’s youth had been touched by history, with the crime in via Fani committed a few steps from the elementary school where the personality of a spectator will form ever since, only touched by the events that pass by without ever taking part in them, and by now prisoner of the resigned routine of ordinary employee of the Ministry of Economy. The detachment that belongs to their children from what the illusion of linearity naively makes seem like an already decided future does not concern their individual ambitions, but “a life made up of differences with respect to the common core of that day which marked the beginning of their existence”.
The plot of the novel turns the spotlight on their events on the eve of their common birthday: in June 2018 they would have turned twenty-three, both university students trying not to weigh on the family budget by carrying on occasional jobs. Their affinities end there. Omega struggles in a fast food restaurant until late at night, cultivating the hope that the savings and iron self-discipline in the study will allow him one day to work in the world of food and production chains. Omicron is a listless student who manages to devise a way to make money and a career easily: he starts with betting and selling pills and amphetamines on Roman good nights until he founds a startup for a new social network. Omega is shy and awkward, Omicron seduces women without falling in love. Two stories that began together and were forced to separate and then reconnect in a cruel coincidence.
Two opposing youthful ways of approaching the present of a generation that the author describes as hopelessly condemned to the cynicism of replacing the possibility of being happy with the need to feel adequate to social expectations that show themselves as promises made without consent. Around them the world moves without rules, between the paradoxes of globalization and the looming legacy of the recent past: from gratuitous acts of racist violence in a reality that virtually seems devoted to permanent sharing, to compulsory training courses to make up for unemployment for kids raised in the rhetoric of social redemption up to spread of a pandemic that shows the insecurities of a society that believed itself omnipotent.
Without ever giving in to a moralistic perspective, Ribaudo tells the parable of two brothers who become spokespersons for today’s youth, orphans of an optimistic gaze because they are confused by current events, which the novel photographs with raw realism and with the vivacity of the authentic narrative that prefers to give readers the opportunity to give the readers the opportunity for a more lucid look at the clues for a voyeuristic search for the culprits surrounds them.
The book and the author
The novel by Vito Ribaudo, Omega and Omicron, is published by Morellini Editore (262 pages, 18 euros). Vito Ribaudo is Milanese by birth but Sicilian by affection and origins. In his professional life he is the Human Resources director of Rcs MediaGroup Italia. As an author, he has published the novels A great opportunity (Rizzoli, 2015) and, for Morellini, The Elban (2018) e Blood and Bread (2020) as well as short stories in various anthologies.
February 10, 2023 (change February 10, 2023 | 21:10)
© Time.News