Cassie McCullough

Well, when you put it like that, it's certainly lively.

Today's collection of fiction is going to take us to Ghana, Italy and into the portal that is the internet.

Well, Marco Missaroli's Fidelity is an Italian novel that has apparently set Italy on fire with its insights into life and relationships and it's going to be the subject of a Netflix series very soon.

Now, Kate, I've got this really strong recollection of interviewing her, but because there's no record of it on the internet, I don't know if it's true or not, which is actually kind of a fitting metaphor for this book.

Yeah, and you might have been looking at a cat walking up someone's leg and then some terrible atrocity in a far-flung country.

And then everything seems to be given the same kind of importance, but they're all wildly different things, you know, inputs.

And there's another one where she's going, oh, this is so funny, this is so funny.

And she's looking at people being flung around on a funfair ride and he's saying, this isn't funny.

And she's, oh, oh, no, no, it's not.

It's actually a video of... People have died.

People have died falling off this funfair.

And then she's, oh, this is terrible.

So in just those two examples, it kind of foregrounds the way we experience things online emotionally, really, but...

but without any grounding in reality or the real world.

It's just this sort of free-form, constant experience of being bombarded with... Well, and being bombarded with detail.

Yes.

Well, look, last week I referred to the Ethan Hawke novel as a real Generation X novel.

But I think this is a Generation X novel and a truly sort of literary achievement in that because you almost have to have understood life before the internet to understand what's going on in the first part and indeed the second part.

of it.

It's throwing into your face your interior life on the page in serious literary language and the absurdness of it, but also the distress of the jazz of conflicting images and feelings.