Portrait of a millennial raised with love and prisoner of his own hell

The non-existent evil is a psychological and introspective work by the Italian writer Giulia Caminito (Rome, 1988). After winning the Campiello with an equally scathing and complex work, The lake water is never sweet (L’Altra, 2022), the author once again reveals herself as a keen but ruthless observer of society and the hidden and perverse mechanisms that silently permeate it. It is a slow infiltration, a discomfort that does not explode but festers. And it is here that the title becomes a trap: evil is not only present, but it manifests itself in its most contemporary form, the one we cannot name.

Caminito constructs a protagonist who moves in an ecosystem of emotional and material precariousness that does not require excessive dramatization. Everything is easy to recognize: liquid relationships, mental fragility disguised as functionality, the body as a silent battlefield. Lori is a millennial, the only child of parents who raised him with love and faith in the future. He is now thirty years old, graduated in literature, found love with Jo and a poorly paid job in a publishing house. But suddenly, everything turns upside down: a disturbing entity knocks on the door: Catastrophe, an imaginary lover, the concept that serves to express the illness that alters Loris's life, making it impossible for him to live fully, starting with his relationship with Jo. Because Catastrophe is hypochondria, a chronic and obsessive malaise that begins in the stomach and a fear of the future that blocks the protagonist. A slave to melatonin and lactic acid bacteria, a prisoner of his own hell, he feeds on tragic real stories in forums and YouTube, and declares that he would prefer a terminal illness to the superficiality with which doctors dismiss him.

A precise portrait of malaise.

Forced to look into the past and observe himself internally, as in a practice of mindfulness, Loris will try to understand the causes of his illness, which are none other than maturity collapsing in the face of a world that does not allow him full emancipation. The narrative alternates between two periods of time: the present, in which Loris, now an adult, struggles to make ends meet and stop feeling insufficient, and the past, when he was a child and the center of his world was represented by his grandfather Tempesta and the house he had in the countryside. But Catastrophe is omnipresent in the boy's life: it changes form and appears to Loris in moments of desperation. Sometimes it takes the form of a girl biting bloody flesh, other times it wears worker's pants and has a cat's tail.

The novel's great success is the way it articulates unease without turning it into a redemption story. There is no catharsis, no moral lesson. Instead, there is a kind of suspension: the characters exist in a state of constant provisionality, as if everything could break at any moment. A sustained tension that is the true engine of the text. However, this same commitment is also its risk. At times, restraint becomes distance, and the reader may feel that it lacks substance, that the novel deliberately avoids open conflict. But perhaps this is precisely its statement of intent: contemporary evil is not strident, it is diffuse; it is not narrative, it is atmospheric.