A girl sits on a flat spare tire, in the middle of nowhere in the Novara countryside. Her hair, once candy floss pink, is now a tangle of unlikely colors. Few would recognize her as Cloro, an internet celebrity with millions of followers around the world. With her, trying to repair a car that has clocked up thousands of miles, is Leo, a disillusioned thirty-four-year-old who has had nothing of what he expected from life – and to say he didn’t expect much. Only someone like him, with nothing to lose, would have agreed to leave Milan for the Catania hinterland to recover a friend who ended up in a supposed sect where people live like in the 1990s. The sect really exists, inside an abandoned farmhouse, and is led by Zan, an ambiguous and magnetic man convinced he has understood the Truth after a nightmare job as a moderator of a platform. Leo stays at the masseria for three months, but only notices Cloro when she asks him for a ride to Milan. Thus begins their car journey from Sicily to Lombardy, a planned sixteen-hour journey that expands into five days, through various stops in cities and villages with increasingly surreal atmospheres, because Italy is about to enter lockdown. Leo and Cloro, who couldn’t be more different, reconstruct their lives and the reasons that brought them to the masseria during the journey, argue, misunderstand each other, distance themselves and get closer again, more similar than either of them are willing to accept. With Doveva essere il nostro momento, Eleonora C. Caruso continues an ideal path that began with Le ferita originali and continued with Tutto chiusi tranne il cielo to deliver us her most layered and complete novel. Through her formidable characters she stages the fears, desires and failures of two generations, always on the verge of grasping the meaning – which continually eludes – of their existence in the world, to which to hold on when everything seems to slide towards ruin. (Source: Ibs.it)
she is an italian writer
