Here are the «rooted» of Marco Balzano- Corriere.it

Perhaps Giuliano, the priest who replaces Don Martino in the neighborhood parish, will find his vocation again. And Luca and Veronica will resume seeing each other (and loving each other) clandestinely. Who knows if Giorgio, Carlotta and Peppe will sell their mother’s apartment. And what happened to Sofia, will she go back to living in her house, a cartoon of hers, in front of the first window of the department store?
Marco Balzano does not give answers. He observes these characters, his characters, as they touch, meet, get lost
. She follows them for a while, then lets them go. Portions of existences — protagonists of Café Royal, the new novel by the writer to be released on May 2 by Einaudi — which gravitate around a street in Milan, via Marghera, and a bar. This unites them. A geolocation. And a basic unease, which makes them feel close to us, disoriented as we are in an uncertain, post-pandemic world.

Points of view. “We won’t become like them, will we? I don’t want to work eight hours a day in the office, start a family, always be tired and perpetually on a diet. And above all I don’t want to go out just once a month to pretend that everything is fine», admits Cristina while chatting with Noemi, a beautiful teenager. They have an aperitif “at the Chinese bar” in front of the Café Royal. There, however, with the friends of the chat «Escape from Alcatraz», there goes Serena, mother of Noemi, always struggling with the passage of time, to the point of making herself ridiculous, as her daughter points out bluntly. Elena, on the other hand, has decided to leave Pietro, her husband. She writes to him in a letter: «
At forty-eight I fell in love with a stranger who doesn’t even know it and who I may never see again. Someone who downed Montenegro in a downtown bar and wore a face identical to mine». Thanks to the meeting with Beatrice, Michele finds the push to call his father, whom he hasn’t seen for too long.

It is a diverse people. The elderly like Betti, forced (by her children) to live with a camera that follows her every step; thirty-five-year-olds like Gabriele, exhausted by hyperwork during the
lockdown
as much as Federico, a general practitioner who would like just a little peace and instead is mistreated by the patients he doesn’t visit. Teachers like Veronica, who lives in the Porta Venezia area and wonders why her husband is no longer interested in her. Slackers like Lisa, who changes interests every couple of months and who at the psychiatry pavilion of the Bollate hospital, where every Wednesday she goes to visit her brother, holds the fence in her hands “as if she were the one locked up for years”.

Lives that are not ours. By age, by gender, by profession, by income, by tastes. And in which, however, it is possible to empathize. In all.
Balzano delves into the flesh of his protagonists without ever judging them

. It makes them live, simply. And face the rocks – a disappointment at work, a marriage that doesn’t work, the passage of time, the search for a passion that doesn’t arrive, misunderstandings in the family – which everyone sooner or later has to face with varying degrees. The writer makes us look closely at his splendid actors set in the curtain of the Café Royal. It almost seems to spy on them, and perhaps for this reason we would not want to leave them at the end of the novel, but continue to follow them
. With his dry prose – in third or first person – the author takes frames of ordinary lives (with the exception of Sofia, who rejected normalcy: “I was area manager for the Dress stores, I worked twelve hours a day. I was wearing myself out”), perhaps a little sad, immortalized – stuck – during the pandemic and the his tail. And this is the novelty.

Marco Balzano, narrator of tears, of uprooting from one’s land and origins, novelist of farewells (his titles explain it well: Ready for all departures, The latest arrival, I’m staying here, When I’ll be back), author who recounted the emigration of children from the South to the North after World War II, the annexation of South Tyrol to Italy and the diaspora of carers from the East in our country, in this new book, light and profound, witty and melancholic, he returns a sample of “rooted” Milanese who rarely leave their area, let alone the city. P
anointed the compass on the Café Royal and opens (shortly, at most it goes as far as Turin) the spoke,

he lets his protagonists move through that slice of the city, loaded with wounds that they carry with eleganceperfect habitués of via Marghera, with its stately buildings and the more neglected ones, the shop windows, the clubs. Commercial artery and town, with the usual hangouts, the usual people.

Here too Balzano has changed pace. He left the people on the move of exiles, of those looking for one more opportunity in life, to observe middle-class men and women, with a certain geographical and economic stability. He examines them as they stumble over their weaknesses, mess with mates and relatives, pine away with regrets, lose and gain courage. They are fragile, disillusioned. Especially alone. Don Giuliano shakes his head: “In these parts people do without God and the Church and it doesn’t leave me calm at all.” The writer, Milanese like his “travel companions”, partly believes it and partly doesn’t.
Of the “guests” of the Café Royal – to whom one inevitably becomes attached – he above all scours the constant search for lovethe engine that moves them more than money, career, the struggle of living. How ne
The falling in love
by Javier Marías, plays with coincidences, with half-truths, with missed encounters, connections lost by a whisker. It comes to no conclusions. And we, who would like to know how it ends with Elena, Ahmed, Manuel, Barbara, Beatrice, just have to imagine them in via Marghera, at the tables of the Café Royal, recalling the three verses by Giovanni Raboni that Balzano quotes in the epigraph: « Even us passengers / from opposite destinations / sometimes happen to brush against each other».