Luca Raimondi's "Se avessi previsto tutto questo"

This genre of novels arouses interest not for the plot nor for the style which, although correct, is original only in the alternation between colloquial and scholastic. If anything, as a mirror, more than of a generation — “If I had foreseen all this”, by Luca Raimondi, is set in the nineties, to tell us about it there are many small details and the musical soundtrack — rather of a climate, of an atmosphere, attributable to today’s, of young people immersed in a precariousness that is not only work but extends to all aspects of life, from study, to ethics, to feelings. It is a moral precariat of values, interests, culture, passions. A generation that goes from the nineties to 2016, which includes eighteen and forty-year-olds and is characterized by an absence of center, of references, of real involvement. A generation that floats in the void, with a creeping depression and a total absence of purpose or direction.

There is no work and neither is it sought. You don’t like studying, you stay parked in the university to play it off and because you think you deserve “something more” than a manual occupation. The days consist of hanging around here and there, pretending to do, ready to stop at the slightest call and to postpone commitments. Time unfolds uselessly until evening, when we set out in search of company, which is never true friendship, and of alcohol, drugs, sex. On top of everything there is the myth of love but, in reality, commitment is frightening.

Carlo Piras, the protagonist of this novel, is an altogether unpleasant character, ready to betray his friends by trying to steal the girl from them. His lack of scruples seems too open and sincere to us, it places us in front of areas of our humanity that we would prefer not to see. Who among us has never spied on the partner of a friend, hoping that those eyes would fall on us instead of the legitimate boyfriend or girlfriend?

Carlo Piras is not in love, he just needs to get out of his condition as a shy gregarious, antisocial and out of place everywhere.

“Carlo feels once again the sensation of finding himself alone in the crowd, of being a soul who seeks some connection with the world but does not find it, perhaps because he does not want it enough.” (page 48)

Paradoxically, he gets status and dignity only at the end, when he gives the worst of himself but does it without shame or false qualms, openly declaring his longings. The irony with which the author looks at him is not enough, however, to make him sympathetic.

The best part of the novel is given by the poetics of nostalgia, omnipresent and transversal in the writing of this early millennium, where everything ends too quickly and the fear of losing what little we have had or have been unites young and old. While life still has to take shape, nostalgia, the beast that bites us and never gives up, is already lurking.

“His former companions belong to an era marked by rituals that are no longer in force: the eight-thirty bell, the questions of the teachers, the discussions during the ten minutes of the break, the hours of physical education spent walking at the sports center talking about this and that. Moments, moments, which will never recur. And now that their destinies are divergent, beyond their current appearance, it is not possible to recreate the atmosphere of the past and all that remains is the sad and somewhat pathetic attempt to retreat to the atmosphere of those five years spent together. “ (page 168)