Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Flips department
by Enrico Morello
The flips are those that Arturo Speranza, the protagonist of this novel, must do. Arturo is a fifty-year-old lawyer with an increasingly faint past of wealth, he wanders between tax collection notices, the maintenance of his ex-wife and class trips that are to be paid for his children. Things seem to change for the better when suddenly a friend from high school times reappears, which has since become very rich in a rather mysterious way and after a stay abroad for many years. The old companion entrusts Arturo with all the legal battles of his firm, conducted against an oligopoly and powerful forces that by every means try to hinder his activity. This will start a struggle without quarter that will see the two former schoolmates fight side by side, until things change again. An amusing novel, a tragic comedy about today’s middle class, on the changes and disappointments of an entire generation, grown with the myth of economic progress and ended up dealing with the failure of an entire nation, experienced as a personal failure. A portrait that is at times comic and at times bitter, of how in Italy large capitals and opportunities are in the hands of few, and unfortunately not the best among us, while an entire class of professionals is in fact humiliated.
