Nicola, Milan

It was the lies he told that reminded me of that past of mine that I hadn'tencountered in a while. He was telling me the kinds of lies where the teller implies that thingsthat have only happened to him once are long-running habits. Things about too much whiskey, Celineand De Sade, eating alone in expensive Japanese restaurants, knowing nobody (this last fact he wouldcontinue to repeat in later meetings, it seeming more barbarously unreal each time). -- from Nicola, Milan

Vaguely employed as a brand strategist in theheart of the transnational art-fashion-cultural world, the twenty-six-year-old unnamed narrator ofNicola, Milan can spend hours at a dinner party parsing the difference betweenhumor and irony, dressed a la mode in a dinner jacket and a pair of twenty-year-old sunglasses. Heis just as acutely aware of the limits of boredom and taste, travel, and style: he is aninternational loner, watch-checker, and tip-leaver, drifting from airport to bar, taxi tomotel.

But when he meets the slightly older, richer, and worldlier Nicola, hebecomes fascinated with him, seeing Nicola as a transcendental exemplar of theinternational-creative class culture he both envies and loathes. As the narrator stalks Nicolathrough the streets of Milan and its outskirts, what began as a casual friendship develops into anobsessive attachment, a crisis of identity connecting two drifters, and a struggle against the quietoblivion usually hidden by the web of tics and affectations that constitute apersonality.

Combining a Houellebecq-like sense of the psychic malaise beneath thesurface of contemporary cultural life with the dispassionate voice of a police report,Nicola, Milan tells a story of perverse, asexual frenzy emptying out into thevoid.

Lodovico Pignatti Morano was born in London and grew up mostly in Australia. He is the author of Cinelli: The Art and Design of the Bicycle (Rizzoli New York, 2012), and editor of Ideas from Massimo Osti (Damiani, 2012). He attended Goldsmiths University in London, and moved to Italy in 2009 to work in the cycling industry.