They’re All Right
Feltrinelli 2010, 320 pages
(translation rights Feltrinelli)
Shortlisted for Premio Strega 2010
“Even literary critics dream. They dream that one day they will review a novel as beautiful as That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana or Acquainted with Grief by Carlo Emilio Gadda or Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
As if they were published now, in 2010, and not in 1957 or in 1963 or in 1932. Today their dream has come true. That beautiful novel exists and it is entitled Hanno tutti ragione”
- Corriere della Sera
“Paolo Sorrentino fait une entrée tonitruante en littérature”
- Le Monde des Livres (full interview)
“Tony Pagoda, the protagonist of Hanno tutti ragione, is a character that stays with you, lingering long in the mind”
- l’Espresso
“A stand-out novel: sincere, grotesque with an extraordinary quality to the language”
- Tuttolibri
Hanno tutti ragione is the extraordinary début by one of the most famous Italian film directors and screenwriters.
It’s the story of Tony Pagoda, a Neapolitan melodic singer with a colorful past, a picaresque hero of our time. We meet him in the early Eighties, in a blooming and wildly happy Italy, between Naples, Capri and the world. Tony is a talented and successful artist, has money and women, and he likes all kind of extremes and extravagances—but he is not superficial. His friends can be extraordinary men or miserable people, and from all of them he learns something. When life gets complicated, when the scene shifts, Tony Pagoda knows it’s time for a change. He goes on a short tour in Brazil and decides to stay there; first in Rio, then in Manaus, crowned by a new freedom and obsessed with cockroaches. But after eighteen years of humid amazonic exile, somebody is willing to sign a stratospheric check to make him come back to Italy. A new life is expecting him.
About Hanno tutti ragione, the critic Antonio D’Orrico has said: “After I had read this beautiful novel I thought of Ezra Pound, who saw the magnificence of Venice and asked God what kind of punishment humans should expect for such an early reward”.
Paolo Sorrentino (Naples 1970)
is one the most famous Italian film directors and screenwriters (One Man Up, 2001; The Consequences of Love, 2004; The Family Friend, 2006; Il Divo, 2008, Prix du Jury at Cannes Film Festival), internationally recognized and appreciated. His most recent movie is This Must Be the Place (2011), interpreted by Sean Penn.
Foreign rights sold in
France: Albin Michel
Germany: Aufbau
Israel: Kinneret
The Netherlands: Lebowski
Spain: Anagrama
UK: Harvill Secker
US: Europa Editions
Photo: © Chuck Zlotnick