Stefana, the acrid scent of the East slips through the cages of literary genres to tell, with a direct and brilliant style, which acts as a counterweight to the intrinsic roughness of situations, a story of our globalized days, in which the end of ideologies, in the East as in the West, risks bordering on the end of values tout court. Even if, as Gino JB Brandi says, “everything is compromised but nothing is lost. Still". It is the first novel by Vittorio Borelli, former director of East and for years spokesperson for Alessandro Profumo in Unicredit, which is in bookstores these days for Silvy editions (info@silvyedizioni.com).
The rubble and the decay, above all moral, of the post-communist world are the backdrop to Stefana's compelling narrative. The West, however, fails to present itself as a credible alternative while organized crime demonstrates its cultural modernity and ability to compete with the legitimately constituted powers. A novel about today's world as compelling as a thriller.
What the series is about?: Romania, 1999. In a squalid apartment in anonymous post-Ceausescu Bucharest, the life of twelve-year-old Stefana seems to have reached a tragic epilogue. Orphaned by the American journalist Tom Lindner and the Romanian sociologist Petra Stanila, the little girl fell into the hands of an unscrupulous criminal organization dedicated to infamous trafficking. Pakistan, 1997. Sent to Islamabad by the CharityOng, the non-governmental organization for which she works, Petra meets Gino JB Brandi, manager of a company in Milan that manufactures and exports hospital equipment around the world. Intransigent and idealistic she, cynical (but not too much) and disenchanted him, passed like a salamander through the ideological fury of the sixties and seventies. An intense love story develops between the two and it is to JB that Petra, on her deathbed, will entrust her daughter Stefana. JB won't back down; risking his own life to snatch Stefana from her captors, he will find himself involved in an intricate story of corruption and organized crime. At his side, the charming French ex-wife, a couple of experienced Romanian policemen, an Arab journalist and a very young American, a true IT genius.
Victor Borelli borrowed JB's irreverent Milanese irony to tell, with a writing "light as a thought from the nouveaux philosophes", aa history of our days against the background of which emerge the degradation and contradictions of central-eastern Europe at the end of the millennium, suspended between the shadows of the ideologies of the past and the mirage of nascent globalization. Where everything is for sale. Where, JB would say, "love is like the metaphor of Achilles and the tortoise: one pursues something that one can never reach". But where, in the end, all is not said to be lost…
