“Sometimes, when one has run out of brakes, there are saints in heaven who put them on the brakes instead of the brakes so you don't get killed. Those are the brake saints there.” Ugo Cornia has one of the most ramified and scattered kinships that I know of, made up of close relatives, such as the fundamental Aunt Bruna or Aunt Fila, Aunt Maria, great-grandfather Adolfo Ferrari, cousin Mariolina, but also of distant relatives and pseudo-relatives, with their friends, neighbors, acquaintances and non-acquaintances who nevertheless pass through the family area, in a wide and intricate range. And about all these people, about each of them circulate the stories that Hugh collects, stories passed from mouth to mouth, repeated and gradually adjusted, perfected, until they become the synthesis of a person, as if each had come into the world to leave behind that episode, often funny or surprising and memorable, which nevertheless turns out to be the focal and character center of his life. And the stories (new ones have been added in this edition) are collected without embellishment or added literary complacency, in their wonderful simplicity and comicality; thus constituting a kind of minimal epic, or novella in its first album.
I recommend reading the book unhurriedly, one or two stories per evening, and reflecting on it. Because the meaning of our human lives is always a small, minor fact, which remains the emblem of it; which is funny and heart-stringing, like this book.