Me & You

Lorenzo Cuni hovers on the edge of adulthood. A child who is all too aware of his status as an oustider, more intelligent and persipcacious than most, Lorenzo adapts his character to conform to his parents' and peers' expectations. Taking upon himself his father's declaration that he is a 'normal child', Lorenzo constructs an elaborate fantasy: that he is likeable and liked enough to join the most popular children in school on a ski trip. Instead, he intends to spend the week in his parents' basement with a supply of food, books and television. The period of self-enforced solitude is going to plan when his beautiful and disturbed half-sister Olivia arrives and insists on sharing the basement with him…

Me and You has the inexorable sense of bewilderment and dread of Kafka's The Trial, the visual palette of Federico Fellini. Ammanati articulates the alienation experienced by a privileged child who does not fit into the wealthy, polished world into which he was born. The angst and self-destructiveness of the troubled Olivia, whose relationship with her father contains elements of the Freudian, is brilliantly and succinctly depicted. Ammanati's genius lies in his ability to evoke pathos through dialogue, be it between his characters or upon the world stage upon which human life is played out. His narrative of flawed innocence and loss, loyalty and filial love, rage and hatred, secrecy and solitude culminating in an ending that arouses the paradoxical emotions of shock and fatalism forces the reader not so much to read the book as participate in it.