When did Antonello Durante start to sink in? With that sly, crumpled air, he always had the physique du rôle of the rock photographer whose shots, according to one authoritative judgment, “changed the way we look at a concert.”

Too bad that for several years now, because of the advent of autofocus and digital, and then the crisis in newspapers and the recording industry, his standard of living has taken a series of increasingly hard blows; not to mention the separation from Diana, the wife he continues to love dearly.

The fact remains that for four months Antonello has been missing. The only one who knows anything is his best friend, Luca Vinciguerra, a successful novelist, barricaded in habits somewhere between the epicurean and the monastic, whom Antonello has secretly contacted from his “exile” and to whom he has delivered a manuscript in which he tells how things went. How did it happen, for one thing, that Antonello found himself aboard an old Cinquecento in the company of the frontman of a Belgian rock band, dEUS, on a discombobulated on-the-road trip? In search of what? On the run from whom?

Sinceramente non tuo is a novel that is rueful and cultured, bitter and ironic, sharp and disorienting. It is a hilarious journey along the roads of Europe and within the great dream of the 1980s and 1990s, of rock music and of a world, that of today’s generation of 50-year-olds, that has to accept its failures. But which can also count on great strength: the ability to share devouring passions, the pleasure of conversation, the horror of touchiness (and of men wearing sandals), the satisfaction given by mutual mockery. In a single word: friendship.