Up-to-date road map of all my kisses

Much more similar to a “fictional essay” than an actual novel, Stradario aggiornato di tutti i miei baci is – as the author herself states – a “disasterology”, a treatise on the difficulties of living in this world and following its laws: “it's about ‘unadaptable people’, those who feel uncomfortable wherever they are, islands in the human sea, who have no familiarity with the world's material and immaterial things, such as – above all – love.” The many facets of Eros (the encounter, flirting, pleasure, wrong cohabitations, violence, idealisation, dependence) are torn apart in a lucid and hyperrealistic diary where every detail is both scientific data and a wound to the soul. From the COVID-19 pandemic to everyday life in Rome, all becomes part of an ironic and tumultuous narration. An ironic and irreverent catalogue of “human case studies”, a gallery of portraits showing human and professional types, sketches of men representing the stages of a personal inner journey, forming a kind of anthropological study of male humanity. Amongst all the men collected by the protagonist, the only constant is A., an unreachable Sicilian Dionysus able to check all her sabotage attempts while she migrates, tirelessly, from a love story to another, driven at times by hunger, by the need to feel loved or desired, or by the want to fill an emotional gap of which she's fully aware of: the one left by the sudden death of her father.  

Stradario aggiornato di tutti i miei baci (Up-to-date road map of all my kisses)
Daniela Ranieri
Ponte alle Grazie, 2021