La persona peggiore is a shapeless autofictional midlife-crisis novel about Raffaella, a newly married woman who flees Rome for Bali because marriage, adulthood, work, friendship, family, class, aging, fathers, men, yoga, sex, feminism, capitalism, Milan, Rome, and her own life all make her feel trapped. The book wants to be ruthless, funny, feminist, self-lacerating, and socially acute. Mostly, it is an endless, sloppy monologue that mistakes contempt for intelligence and repetition for depth.
The novel opens in Ubud, at a pseudo-spiritual sex party organized by a shirtless fifty-year-old Swiss man who calls himself Shiva. That opening is designed to be provocative: illegal erotic event, cacao ceremonies, tantra vocabulary, “safe space,” women invited to balance the male-female ratio, and a crowd of Western expats who have transformed their inability to function at home into sacred sexuality. Raffaella pays Shiva in cash, attends the preliminary sauna, judges everybody around her, and still does exactly what they do. This is the book’s entire mechanism, visible from page one: she despises a world while desperately wanting entrance into it.
The Bali satire is not subtle. Shiva is a fraud. The women are spiritual influencers, orgasm coaches, sacred-goddess entrepreneurs, and failed Western adults. The men are surfers, digital nomads, tantra creeps, pseudo-sensitive narcissists, and soft predators with better vocabulary. Everyone says “energy,” “safe space,” “shakti,” “juicy,” and “in your power.” Everyone is thin, flexible, performatively healed, and morally ridiculous. The problem is that none of this is fresh. Bali-as-wellness-hell, Eat Pray Love after the rot has set in, Westerners turning crisis into yoga, sex, cacao, and self-branding: the book behaves as though it has discovered a new target, but it is hitting a piñata that has already been beaten flat.
