“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“I’ve always been an architect of problems.”
The first thing to say is that Ilaria Camilletti was born in 2005. The second thing to say is that this book isn’t beautiful despite, or even though, the author is twenty years old. It’s simply beautiful. It’s important to say that. Obviously, “beautiful” is an adjective that requires qualification, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, but for now.
Ilaria has just finished her high school diploma, with no clear ideas about anything (unlike Giulia, who wanted to be a midwife since kindergarten), vaguely guided by an abstract desire for happiness. In her post-school disorientation, she decides to work for a season at a beach resort in Ostia, with few specific tasks, minimal communication needs, and a giant “I’ll think about it later” hanging over her head. In this jungle of anomalies, she’s the only Italian, along with little Davide, the owner’s unbearable son, a summer marred by semi-parental abandonment, an inexhaustible stream of science research, and boredom. The two grow closer reluctantly. Ilaria helps Davide—spoiled, overbearing, and with a deadly sense of humor—with his research, while Davide recounts Ilaria’s life in prayer to a Jesus who must necessarily be familiar with the Roman dialect. And then there’s Viola. Viola is the strange little girl who, every day, under the scorching sun in a regulation black hood, sets up her flea market of broken objects and stories as strange as she is.
The three meet in the microcosm of the beach and that summer season when things happen that perhaps wouldn’t have a chance in everyday life. You never know what survives from the intensity of those three months; you always return a little changed, unable to explain how or why. Ilaria recounts the ritual of the holidays, its metamorphoses, through an exceptional linguistic pastiche of Italian, Roman, and Bengali, with an overflowing comic effect and a transgenerational sensitivity that is enlightening and moving. Over the years, we’ve learned that to make people laugh and cry throughout a book, you have to be truly, truly good. Camilletti succeeds. The kind of insight he gives us is invaluable because it’s intelligent and humble, allowing us to peer beneath the surface without captions or lengthy explanations, with the naturalness of his age, when introversion is a way of observing life, waiting for something, anything, to happen, because we don’t yet feel like actors but mere spectators. Not everyone grows up feeling entitled to ask Jesus what they want, as if He were “the Amazon.”
“What do you think Viola is doing now? What is she doing? Laughing? Coughing? Screaming? Does she miss me? Does she miss me, Jesus? Now, you don’t have to answer me now.” Beneath Davide’s prayers, Viola’s poems, Amir’s silences and Omar’s elegant gestures, Sayed’s brusque words and Ileria’s clumsiness, an unexpected possibility slowly builds: that of taking the time to understand how to be happy, suddenly perceiving the possibility that, whatever the choice, we will be free to change our minds, change pace, job, direction; that that possibility (of being happy and of changing if we are no longer) is never given once and for all; we build it day by day. “Nobody ever told me, Ileria, that I could change.” It takes a little courage. And kindness. So this novel, funny and bitter and tender, helps us build bridges around us, towards that and those we don’t yet know, and also gives us the push to cross them.
Does that seem like a small amount? Not to us, it seems like a lot.
Written by Delis
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ilaria Camilletti, Ilaria nella giungla, Accento, Milano, 2026