Paul Auster meets Stephen King in this poetic yet disturbing investigation into the darkest corners of human nature. After the coral, ambitious Le case del malcontento, Sasha Naspini comes back with a tightly plotted narrative that keeps you at the edge of your seat from page one to the very end, while drawing with sharp sensibility broken characters who fight against all odds to put their pieces back together in unexpected new shapes.
Laura disappears on the 12th of August 1999, at eight years old. She is found 14 years later in a bunker. She’s 22 now.
Luca is having dinner with his father, just another evening, always the same for the last thirty years. Someone knocks at the door: it’s the police.
What happens if one day you find out the person who raised you is a monster?
Ossigeno is the story of those who stay after everything and everyone else have gone. The arrest of the monster is the beginning of a new life, one that seemed impossible to imagine – there are no cages anymore, but the characters are nevertheless stuck in their own minds, made of memories and scars they can’t forget. Luca’s father was his bridge to reality, he was his moral compass, someone to look up to. After the death of his mother, he had become his whole family. And throughout this whole time, he was monster. Where does this leave Luca? Is he a monster too, for sharing is father’s blood?
Meanwhile, Laura is trying hard to live again. Her mother doesn’t know how to talk to her. Laura smiles, she acts normal. She likes to wander around the city – she likes to get lost in the crowd. But sometimes she feels the need to be surrounded by walls. She locks herself in a random bathroom. She could stay there for hours, until someone knocks. No one knows what she’s doing in there.
Ossigeno is a matrioska. Characters close themselves in dark boxes – and a boy in Wyoming hides in a locket, not knowing he has always been captive inside someone else’s nightmare.
Ossigeno is not a psychological thriller – it is not a crime novel. It is a story of dark roots and curious, eerie minds. Of secrets buried so deep that become seeds for madness. Of masks worn so tightly they become your own skin. But what’s underneath, no matter how hard you try, is still there. Hidden. Observing. Waiting to see what happens.
Sasha Naspini’s previous novel, Le Case del malcontento, was sold in China, Korea, Greece and Turkey and is being considered by many publishers worldwide. Its passionate, extremely sophisticated story-telling and unforgettable characterization makes it a psychological masterpiece, an analysis on the complexity of human nature – I would say it’s the Italian Spoon River Anthology, and the title has also been compared to Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. With a vernacular yet classical, literary language, and multiple points of view, Le Case is an epic rural tale with a universal echo. The novel plays with genres, mixing noir, psychological thriller, historical memoir and dark fairy-tale.
