Gianluca Tantillo’s Senza tarì e il sogno della Merica is the novel you would not expect from a first-time author: the book has a captivating narrative plot and the characters are realistic and convincing. With a great lightness of narrative, and his very personal style, Tantillo manages to capture the reader’s attention from the first to the last page, recounting the saga of the Schiera family, who have been saddled with the nickname or “nciuria ‘senza tarì”, or “poor in the barrel”, like an infamous label.

Between sincere truth and irreverent (but never cynical) irony, the narrative thread unwinds between past and present, often comparing the problems of different generations, from the sanguine grandfather Peppino who worked at Trabia’s pasta factory to the weak and surrendering grandson Antonio, chronically unemployed; but Tantillo actually unrolls before our eyes a choral novel, in which there is the whole of Trabia with its vices and virtues, neighbourhood relations, gossip, madness and surreal and amusing episodes, hopes and good feelings, disappointments and difficult choices to be made. Together with grandfather Peppino, the figure of mastro Ercole, the village puppeteer with a generous heart, Antonio Schiera’s only sincere friend and point of reference, with whom he loves to share lunches and delicacies that have the taste of festivity and the warmth of family, emerges in the story. In the background of the narrative are landscapes that are also places of the soul, painted by Tantillo with the same nuanced delicacy with which Daniela Verduci has skilfully illustrated the book’s cover. The ending surprised me but at the same time, thinking back, it seemed perfectly in line with the whole novel.