Too often, each of us tries to build our own personal paradise, a fleeting Eden carefully constructed over the years. A paradise made of comfort, amnesia, omissions, quiet living, and relationships that are never too deep, even with those who are by our side every day.
Cosimo Praticò, the protagonist of Il morto presodato (Alcatraz, 2025, pp. 248), Piera Rampino's debut novel , is no exception. Praticò is a good man, but not overly so, naive, but not entirely, who believes, or wants to believe, in what doesn't exist. He has a normal life, a wife, two children, and a job in the public administration. Suddenly, he is forced to defend himself in court. The registry office mistakenly records his date of death. Although he initially decides to do nothing, his subsequent attempts to obtain a rectification collide with the presumption of infallibility of the public administration and its upright officials. The trial of Cosimo Praticò, declared dead but who insists he is still alive, could end with a sentence of up to six years in prison for having given a false identity. Meanwhile, the paradise he's always sought refuge in appears on the verge of collapse when the lives of his wife Franca, his children Antonio and Giulia, and his brother Ettore seem to flourish following his death. But does it make sense to try to return to life, reviving his former existence?
Starting from a surreal and grotesque situation, Piera Rampino constructs a family novel that draws directly from Pirandello, Kafka, and even Gogol's stories like "The Nose" and "The Overcoat ." She thus explores our everyday masks and lies, writing a lucid investigation into the cracks in the family, a place too often marked by silence, unexpressed resentment, and complex psychological knots of incommunicability.
An unwitting liar, or an unreliably honest man, Cosimo has long been trapped in a self-deception that breeds a dull unhappiness within his family. For him, paradise is home, a refuge constructed through a patient reworking of reality; but domestic tranquility, the fruit of an unconscious artifice, has long been creaking, threatening to collapse upon him, as indeed it does when he is declared dead due to a bureaucratic error. At that point, anything becomes possible, and the race for new forms of Eden is open for all the book's protagonists. For Franca and Ettore, for example, paradise is lost happiness, unexpectedly rediscovered with Cosimo's presumed death and defended at all costs, even by denying Cosimo's existence. Thus emerge the weight of resentment and the psychological shadows that weigh on the most intimate bonds and his personal paradises, too often built on houses of cards.
