THE SEASIDE SUMMER CAMPS by Gianluca Mancini
(English Translation by Vicki F. Weinstein, Ph. D.)
(SYNOPSIS)
(English Translation by Vicki F. Weinstein, Ph. D.)
(SYNOPSIS)
PUBBLICATO ED ACQUISTABILE ON-LINE su www.lulu.com in versione italiana (LE COLONIE MARINE) o in versione inglese (THE SEASIDE SUMMER CAMPS).
In the summer of 1997, in Ravenna, Italy, strange, obscure accidents, presages of death and old guilt feelings torment Manuele, but also Davide and Umberto. What links the vicissitudes of the three main personages, all 35 years old, an architect, an engineer and a wholesale toy salesman, is the Seaside Summer Camps on the Romagnola Adriatic Riviera: immense, imposing buildings erected in the 1930s in an apparently mad futuristic style to celebrate the social strength and dynamic power of the Fascist Regime and to combat childhood diseases with heliotherapy and thalassotherapy.
The plot develops on two convergent planes: one in the present and the other in the 1960s, which is inexorably rejoined to the present. A third time plane buried still deeper in the past, in the Ventennio, the twenty year Fascist period from 1923 to 1943, emerges by surprise and is the keystone of the entire enigma hidden behind the tragic, apparently fortuitous events that strike the various protagonists.
In Gianluca Mancini’s noir novel, Manuele is particularly obsessed by the possibility of macabre mortal accidents on the job and by a terrible trauma suffered as a child, the death of his little cousin Carlo by drowning in the sea near the Marina di Ravenna summer camp on the day of Saint Lorenzo (August 10th).
Davide, deeply Catholic, fatherless (his father, a famous engineer, died in 1963 in the tragic disaster of the Vajont Dam), perhaps endowed with supernatural premonitory powers, perceives finer vibrations, echoes of evil and blasphemous thoughts contained in writings sprayed on walls.
Manuele’s wedding with Annalisa, the daughter of a politically powerful man, is looming. Thanks to his future father-in-law’s connections, Manuele and Davide’s firm has been awarded an important contract: the renovation of the two malfunctioning water towers in the seaside town of Cesenatico.
But the enigmatic hydro-engineering problem seems impossible to solve, and Manuele is not really in love with Annalisa.
And there is also an Evil that is advancing behind the scenes. An Evil that at times can have the ambiguous face of the beautiful but strange Alessia, or the cruel, merciless face, demonic and omniscient, of the fifty-four-year-old swimming instructor Franco Fratelli, a real serial killer animated by revenge, or a visage buried still deeper in the tenebrous past, in the figure of a legendary but forgotten Olympic swimming champion of the Fascist Ventennio, the architect Bruno De Grigis.
The ending of the novel, after a series of psychological traumas and sanguinary events, leads to a dramatic double confrontation.
In the summer of 1997, in Ravenna, Italy, strange, obscure accidents, presages of death and old guilt feelings torment Manuele, but also Davide and Umberto. What links the vicissitudes of the three main personages, all 35 years old, an architect, an engineer and a wholesale toy salesman, is the Seaside Summer Camps on the Romagnola Adriatic Riviera: immense, imposing buildings erected in the 1930s in an apparently mad futuristic style to celebrate the social strength and dynamic power of the Fascist Regime and to combat childhood diseases with heliotherapy and thalassotherapy.
The plot develops on two convergent planes: one in the present and the other in the 1960s, which is inexorably rejoined to the present. A third time plane buried still deeper in the past, in the Ventennio, the twenty year Fascist period from 1923 to 1943, emerges by surprise and is the keystone of the entire enigma hidden behind the tragic, apparently fortuitous events that strike the various protagonists.
In Gianluca Mancini’s noir novel, Manuele is particularly obsessed by the possibility of macabre mortal accidents on the job and by a terrible trauma suffered as a child, the death of his little cousin Carlo by drowning in the sea near the Marina di Ravenna summer camp on the day of Saint Lorenzo (August 10th).
Davide, deeply Catholic, fatherless (his father, a famous engineer, died in 1963 in the tragic disaster of the Vajont Dam), perhaps endowed with supernatural premonitory powers, perceives finer vibrations, echoes of evil and blasphemous thoughts contained in writings sprayed on walls.
Manuele’s wedding with Annalisa, the daughter of a politically powerful man, is looming. Thanks to his future father-in-law’s connections, Manuele and Davide’s firm has been awarded an important contract: the renovation of the two malfunctioning water towers in the seaside town of Cesenatico.
But the enigmatic hydro-engineering problem seems impossible to solve, and Manuele is not really in love with Annalisa.
And there is also an Evil that is advancing behind the scenes. An Evil that at times can have the ambiguous face of the beautiful but strange Alessia, or the cruel, merciless face, demonic and omniscient, of the fifty-four-year-old swimming instructor Franco Fratelli, a real serial killer animated by revenge, or a visage buried still deeper in the tenebrous past, in the figure of a legendary but forgotten Olympic swimming champion of the Fascist Ventennio, the architect Bruno De Grigis.
The ending of the novel, after a series of psychological traumas and sanguinary events, leads to a dramatic double confrontation.
