Live Bait

by Fabio Genovesi

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The story of a small Italian town where fishing, biking, and rock 'n' roll make the news, until tragedy turns everything upside down.

Muglione. Nothing grows in this Tuscan backwater except the wild imagination of Fiorenzo, a nineteen-year-old metalhead. He lives for his garage band, horror movies, and fishing in the murky irrigation ditches outside of town. But when his path crosses with Mirko, the teenage cycling phenomenon, and Tiziana, the smart but frustrated head of the local youth center turned refuge for the town's hard-drinking seniors, his world will never be the same. From the brink of despair they fight their way back through honesty, resilience, and laughter, their fates interweaving in a story that is at once achingly funny, bitter, and full of poetic fervor.

Told with the tenderness of a Fellini film, this contemporary novel continues the great tradition of Italian literature and cinema.

Release date: July 1, 2014

Publisher: Other Press

Print pages: 392

Sample

Galileo was a moron because he said nature’s an open book, and the book’s written in the language of math. So in his opinion everything in the world and in life—all the people and trees and shells and starfish and seahorses and traffic lights and jellyfish—can be broken down into numbers and geometric figures. What a load of bullshit. If I said it, everyone would tell me to shut the fuck up, and they’d be right. Except Galileo said it so it must be true since he was a genius and lived in a time when everyone was a genius or an artist and didn’t waste time at the grocery store, the post office, or the corner bar… they were busy thinking up poems or paintings or, in this case important scientific laws.
 
Bullshit. In Galileo’s time they didn’t have bicycles. They didn’t have electricity, and when they had to go to the bathroom they’d use this nasty bucket and then dump it out the window into the street without even looking to see if anyone was walking by. They didn’t even know how to make ice—can you believe it!—and there used to be people who came down from the mountains selling snow, and people used to buy it!
 
And here we are acting like once upon a time everything was fantastic and deep and nowadays we’re just a bunch of morons…and it’s true, we are morons, except the way I see it we always have been morons, from the caveman days up to this afternoon, when Stefano and I are standing here by the ditch counting.
 
And if we want to compete to see who’s the biggest moron of all, then I’m about to become the world champion.