Tobia Tillerman fuori stagione

Claudio Calò’s Tobia Tillerman fuori stagione is the story of Tobia Tillerman, an Italian-British man approaching forty who has built a glamorous international career in fashion while privately struggling with grief, memory, failed love and the suspicion that he has spent most of his adult life turning emotional pain into polished anecdotes. Tobia works as head stylist for Pietro Maralto, a celebrated Italian designer whose company operates between Milan and London and whose absurd demands dominate the lives of everyone around him. Tobia is bilingual, constantly shifting between Italian and English, and he describes himself as divided between a “mother tongue” and a “father tongue.” This linguistic split becomes a larger metaphor for his personality: he is always moving between identities, cities, relationships and versions of the truth. The novel begins with Tobia openly admitting that he is once again disguising reality, immediately establishing that his narration will be selective, self-conscious and unreliable.

At work, Tobia is surrounded by grotesque luxury and manufactured emergencies. A rival fashion house is rumoured to be launching a supposedly revolutionary colour called “doom,” which sounds suspiciously like black. Maralto becomes furious because a newspaper describes his latest collection as a swan song, interpreting the phrase as an attack on his relevance. He then orders Tobia to attend an event in New York because he himself must travel to Sardinia, where his giraffes have stopped eating. This ridiculous crisis is typical of the novel’s fashion world, in which every minor problem becomes an international catastrophe. Tobia must deal with missing fabrics, disappearing sleeves, impossible celebrity requests, seating politics and publicists terrified of losing control of narratives that are largely invented anyway.

Tobia’s closest friend is Cassandra, or Cass, who has known him since childhood and works in Maralto’s Milan press office partly because Tobia helped her obtain the job. Their friendship begins when they are eight. During a country outing, Tobia falls into a pond, becomes covered in mud and gets lost in a cornfield. When he finally emerges, frightened and humiliated, Cass is waiting for him. Instead of simply comforting him, she deliberately smears mud over her own clothes and hair so they can claim they fell together. The gesture defines their relationship: Cass is the person who will share his humiliation rather than pity him from a safe distance. Years later, shortly before turning thirty, Cass suffers a clinically isolated multifocal neurological episode connected to multiple sclerosis and is temporarily semi-paralysed in her lower limbs. Tobia wishes he could repay her childhood gesture by taking some of her “mud” onto himself, but he cannot.