After the success of Ten things I had forgotten (Rizzoli) the journalist and writer returns to the bookstore Lucrezia Sarnari with the brilliant comedy entitled Escape routes (Rizzoli). The protagonists are the thirty-seven-year-old Giulia, a literature teacher in a Perugia high school, married to Mattia for almost six years but still hungry for love and approval, and the seducer Carlo, a Milanese journalist.

Known in Rome, they inaugurate a relationship clandestine of long weekends in anonymous hotels in the capital telephone calls and above all - of course - of Message WhatsappUntil, out of nowhere, the internet crashes. Giulia is in a panic: she fears that the thread that binds her to Carlo will break. She will have to deal with real life, no longer virtual, and ask herself if Carlo is just one escape or it really is the love, the one with a capital A.

love - green cover of the new book by the writer Lucrezia Sarnari

Escape routes it is a choral novel that amuses and knows how to make us reflect on the quality of today's relationships. "Is the importance we attach to a person directly proportional to the time it takes us to respond to a message from him?","Does our true happiness depend on the blue ticks of a sent message?","How important is virtual life?”These are just some of the questions that the pages will offer for reflection and judgment of the reader.

And it will be easy for many to find themselves in Giulia, in her little neuroses, in her very complicated normality, in search of an escape from an existence that has become stingy with emotions. An escape that is well understood as human need, to be indulged at times, to understand what we really want - to understand ourselves, ultimately. Perhaps profound concepts, but offered by Sarnari with very enjoyable lightness. Because the escape you are talking about is precisely a human moment of lightness, but special, to be dedicated to what makes us feel good, even if it is confused passion, or a temptation. A moment that we could somehow discover therapeutic.

love - close-up of Lucrezia sarnari with sunglasses
Lucrezia Sarnari Facebook

About escape and how love has changed at the time of WhatsApp we talk to Lucrezia Sarnari.

How did you come up with the idea of ​​writing Escape Routes?

The idea was born during a business chat, we talked about social media and how the reaction speed had become a parameter to evaluate the goodness of the relationships we are experiencing. I thought that I had not yet read any novel that told a hypothetical "disconnection" and so I set to work to find characters who could best tell this story.

What must an escape route be like? How would you define it?

In general, something that makes us take a breath when we feel like we are living in apnea.

How beneficial can an escape route be?

Personally, very much. What I argue in the novel is that having some thoughts of escape, both work and relational, but in a broader sense that concerns all those lives that we have not lived but on which we like to fantasize, in the long run it can become functional to better accept existence. that instead we find ourselves living and that, rarely, will be perfect from every point of view.

love - Lucrezia sarnari in bed covers her eyes
Lucrezia Sarnari Facebook

How much of Lucrezia Sarnari can we find in Vie di Fuga?

I can only write about what I know, either because I have lived it directly or because I have experienced it through people close to me. This does not mean that "Vie di Fuga" is an autobiographical novel, but that I take inspiration from the reality that I always observe very carefully. Certainly mine is the syndrome of not feeling “never enough” which Giulia suffers without, it would seem, the possibility of recovery.

La Is the novel's protagonist in search of love with a capital A, reality or utopia?

It depends a lot on what is meant by love with a capital A: Giulia seeks emotions more than love, she wants to feel desired and live only from beginnings. His idea of ​​love is a very adolescent idea that hardly rhymes with stability and lasting relationships. Each of us knows, or should know, what is really necessary for our own well-being: love exists to the extent that we know how to answer the question: "What is love for us?"

Can we still talk about romantic love in the days of WhatsApp?

Of course. What's more romantic and poignant than a message that says: "I miss you"?

At some point in his novel the connection jumps and for its characters it's really hard to come back to life. Have you ever thought about yours without the internet?

Yes, all the time it took me to write the story and I hope it never happens. First, I would lose half of my jobs and then I rate the health of my relationships by the speed of response of the messages, I really like it. Seriously, I believe that even in that case, we would be able to reinvent ourselves anew, establish new priorities and ways of approaching: the real problem for me would be to do without Netflix.

How much has Lucrezia Sarnari grown artistically from Ten things I had forgotten to Vie di Escape?

Artistically I don't know, but I have learned a lot, which is still very little, about writing. The first novel was written only from the gut, here there was a different work on the structure, more tiring but very rewarding.

Bread, love and blue ticks. Interview with Lucrezia Sarnari last edit: 2020-06-14T11:00:00+02:00 da Mariangela Cutrone

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