Imagine a governor of Sardinia who, crushed by a political and personal crisis, decides to get rid of his identity for a day and get on a BlaBlaCar like any other citizen.
It is the beginning of a very different Ferragosto than usual, the one told by Giovanni Follesa in his new novel Un ferragosto, to be released on May 6th.
After two essays on civil unions, Follesa returns to narrative with a story that mixes introspection, irony and social denunciation, set in a lively and true Sardinia, made of beauty, disenchantment and humanity.
The protagonist is Giorgio Sercinu, a powerful and cynical governor of the Island , who in a moment of personal confusion chooses to disguise himself as an ordinary man to listen – really – to what his citizens think. He does so with a stratagem worthy of a picaresque novel: he signs up to BlaBlaCar under a false name and sets off on a road trip across the Island, accompanied by three companions as unlikely as they are revealing.
There is Manuel, a budding artist and student at the Academy of Fine Arts, Bastiano, a soldier-philosopher with sharp reflections, and Ersilia, an eccentric noblewoman who can read the human soul as if it were an open novel. Four lives, four visions of the world, a single car launched on roads that are not only geographical, but interior.
"A Ferragosto is a novel that tells of human frailties," explains Follesa. "It is a book about feelings, about individuals, about relationships between human beings. It investigates power, including political power, and the way it fascinates and dominates us." The journey thus becomes a metaphor for a return to reality, a way to unmask power from behind the mask of officialdom, and finally listen to the voice of the other.
The book will be previewed on May 6th at 6:30 pm in Cagliari at Exma in a meeting hosted by Camilla Soru. The artist Claudia Testa, who signed the evocative cover of the novel, will also be present.
The presentation tour will then touch Olbia, Quartu, Sassari, Alghero and other centers of the island, confirming the author's desire to make his novel travel among the people, exactly as his protagonist does.
