Christophe Palomar

Christophe Palomar was born in Alsace of an Italian father and a Spanish mother and grew up in Tunis. He studied at the HEC in Paris and the Bocconi University in Milan before embarking on a career in management. Since 2017, he has been dividing his time between company consultancy and literature. In 2020, his novel Frieda was published by Ponte alle Grazie to great acclaim.  La crisi colpisce anche di sabato is his second novel.

La crisi colpisce anche di sabato

(A Crisis Can Also Come On a Saturday)

Ponte alle Grazie, August 2021

Full French version available

A sardonic and intense polyphonic novel in which three different characters have to face the remnants of past disappointments in a more-than-ever uncertain present. Three totally unconnected stories that unexpectedly converge.

A Saturday evening. In Rome, from the window of the family apartment, Adriano, a pensioner, watches the setting summer sun and the sunset of his own life, which he spent amid the ideals of a failed revolution, the vague promises of comfort and a marriage that left in its wake nothing but regret. In Milan, Gioia, the CEO of a multinational company and a neglected wife and mother, takes advantage of a moment of solitude to catch up with a backlog of work. Vodka and the recollection of lost loves keep her company, but the past is ready to show itself again. Meanwhile, in Ferrara, a group of young people on the threshold of adulthood go out for a pizza after a trip to the cinema. Hopes and disappointments, couples and singles: everything seems already decided. Three cities and three social conditions united by a common thread, a moral, material, individual and collective crisis that might be eternal and without solution. But, from that Saturday evening, nobody’s life will be the same again.

Frieda

(Frieda)

Ponte alle Grazie, February 2020

A family saga in which love, passion, solitude and betrayal are depicted against the background of great historical upheavals in the early 20th century.

A powerful historical fresco that takes us into Italy’s cosmopolitan environment of the Belle Époque, to the Vienna of joyous apocalypse, the Germany of the Great War then the Weimar Republic, already tainted by budding Nazism, and, finally, to the young and entrancing Buenos Aires of the Thirties.

This novel was written in parallel in French and Italian.

The Frieda of the book title is Frieda von Richthofen, the daughter of a German officer, cousin of the Red Baron and, above all, the muse and wife of D.H. Lawrence. A highly attractive seductress, she is the source of inspiration and passion for the protagonist and narrator of the novel, Joachim von Tilly.

The eleventh descendant of Count von Tilly of Hanover, Joachim seems destined to follow in his father’s footsteps at the helm of the family steelworks. But the road already mapped out for him by this constricting heritage soon turns into an escape that takes him to Naples and Capri, then Vienna, Berlin and, finally, Buenos Aires.

Joachim’s endless escape is studded with encounters, love affairs, hopes and betrayals. These lines, read by Joachim in a mysterious book discovered in Buenos Aires, perhaps suffice to summarise his adventurous life: “Man believes that his decisions extend over a large sphere of action when they actually merely sway between flight and nostalgia.”

 

A classic and at the same time very modern novel with a publishing history full of adventures. A few hundred copies of Frieda were already published in 2015 when it attracted the attention of reviewers and critics. It made the selection for the Campiello prize but had to be withdrawn because of the low print run and an insufficient number of copies to be sent to all the judges. But the press had fallen in love with it by then and there was an increasing number of reviews. Now, Ponte alle Grazie is relaunching this author with an international flavour, a kept promise of Italian literature.

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