“Noialtre però siamo un casino”. Getting married, running away, laughing at everything

On social media, Raffaella Silvestri’s La persona peggiore is reportedly being abbreviated as “PP”. That shorthand suggests just how endearing this novel—recently published by Mondadori—already is. PP is a fresh, entertaining, and—last but not least—well-constructed story featuring a flawed protagonist who gets into one mess after another, yet whom readers cannot help but grow fond of. The narrative voice is intelligent, engaging, and hard to ignore; it is sincere, even at the cost of being brutal.

It opens with a sex party in the jungle of Ubud, Indonesia, at the Shiva temple, where a European man in a sarong has learnt how to charm his lost Western compatriots, who have come to Bali to continue losing themselves whilst telling others – and themselves – that they set out to find themselves. Raffaella is one of them, having fled to Bali because she felt lost – except she did so shortly after marrying Tomas, an intelligent, honest and easy-going Finnish man whom she loves, whom she insisted on marrying, and for whom she left her studio flat in Milan to move to the Rome she detested. Marriage gave her stability and peace of mind, and thus the space for the dissatisfaction and restlessness that had always lain dormant within her to surface: “That’s how I ended up signing up for a three-week yoga teacher training course in Ubud, where they filmed Eat Pray Love twenty years ago”, buying a one-way ticket to go as far away as possible, to resist the temptation to turn back. She feels ill-equipped for adult life, oscillating between disproportionate ambition and imposter syndrome, with a predisposition to obsession and a diagnosis of ADHD.

She is an anti-heroine (a heroine), a world away from both the protagonists of many Italian stories – trapped in the confines of dialect, poverty and the most blatant patriarchal violence – and from the evolved, perfect female role models: ‘We women, though, are a mess. This mess inevitably taints everything we touch, ruins relationships and spills over onto others. I haven’t done any work on myself; I’m spoilt and childish, and now I’m trapped in a situation I chose myself and which I don’t feel up to. I’m the worst person in the world, and this, as an adult, is the worst version of myself’. The situation she is alluding to is her immersion in a world of digital nomads who sell or buy regurgitated spirituality and liberated sexuality, where tantra becomes a very serious justification “to be able to have sex freely”.

Healthy, slim and beautiful bodies: women in tight-fitting yoga trousers and virile men with long, fragrant hair, writhing during sessions of contact and ecstatic dance, and tantric embodiment. Sex is present and described freely, and an erotic vibe runs throughout the novel. The characters are observed without prejudice; the men are often manipulative and inadequate, whilst for the women there is a sense of admiration, as with the defiant intensity of her friend Irina.

Silvestri addresses gender issues, and the solidity of her thinking underpins direct reflections on society and contemporary life – reflections that are never rhetorical, but woven into the narrative (as, for example, in the scene set during the ‘sacred femininity’ course, where the Russian teacher states that our emancipation is achieved by finding a partner commensurate with our social capital). Raffaella is brilliant, ridiculous and selfish, anxious, ashamed and utterly endearing. Her amusing and brazen voice, which seems to betray a despondent, in some passages even sad, disposition, actually conveys a brusque, almost ferocious urgency of life – so incandescent and unstoppable that it overflows, leaving us there, somewhat dazed, laughing out loud on every page.