Erba Grama

Erba Grama is a short, filthy, trauma-saturated return-home novel about Jacopo “Apo” Gambetta, a cocaine-addicted dentist whose mother dies and whose pregnant sister Selene drags him back to the rural hometown he has spent his adult life trying to avoid. It wants to be a novel about family secrets, childhood abuse, addiction, siblings, grief, provincial violence, male sexual damage, and the way memory returns through bodies rather than through explanations. Mostly, it is a sweaty, over-insistent spiral of vomit, blood, teeth, bad sex, drugs, dead parents, and childhood horror, written as if piling more bodily detail onto every page could automatically make the pain truer.

The novel opens in autumn 2017 with Apo waking after a cocaine-and-alcohol night with Marina, a woman he has not quite slept with and has already insulted by diagnosing her genital smell like a clinician at the worst possible moment. He is a dentist, and he cannot stop being one: every body is a chart of symptoms, every mouth a technical site, every sexual encounter a chance for diagnosis, disgust, or humiliation. Marina quickly sees what the reader sees immediately: Apo is repulsive, unstable, funny in flashes, and almost totally unfit for intimacy.

Then his sister Selene calls. Their mother has died of a heart attack. Apo tries to avoid the funeral by claiming he has an important dental surgery scheduled, but Selene knows how to move him. She sends him a sonogram. She is pregnant. This is the real hook. Death does not bring him home; new life does.