Stalin + Bianca
by Iacopo Barison
Tunué, 2014
175 pages
15×21 cm
Stalin + Bianca is a novel about friendship and love, and about how a good mix of the two can help someone get through the most absurd times in a person’s life.
Stalin is a boy of the suburbs, with a huge mustache – to which he owes his nickname – and great troubles with anger control. His neighborhood is a “whole palette of grey”, everything seems to repeat itself over and over. He spends his days with Jean, an old depressed man that uses Stalin for his own purposes, and Bianca, his blind best friend with whom he shares a sort of platonic love.
When, after a fight, Stalin almost kills his stepfather, he runs away from home and brings Bianca with him. The two of them will then start a journey during which they will cross a country torn apart by too many things, by money and emptiness, a country that seems built over the remains of the world we are living in now.
During their trip, the two walk for many kilometers through landscapes filled with a kind of humid, desperate beauty, but also full of happiness and hope, glowing with that special freedom that derives from running away from home. Their trip will also become a great opportunity to learn how many things the world is made of, and how sometimes life is really worth the journey, especially when they finally reach “the big city” and join a community of young artists living on the top of an abandoned skyscraper.
Shortlisted to the Premio Strega 2015
Rights sold: Spanish World Rights (Rey + Naranjo), Italian audio rights
Rights available in all other territories
Iacopo Barison was born in Fossano in 1988. He graduated in Cinema at the University of Torino. His short stories and articles have appeared on several Italian magazines, like minima&moralia and Esquire Italia. The movie director Fabio Mollo directed a short film based on one of his short stories. In 2014 he published Stalin + Bianca, shortlisted to the Premio Strega 2015. Stalin + Bianca will become a movie directed by Daniele Ciprì. In 2018 he published his second novel, Le stelle cadranno tutte insieme, with Fandango Libri. One of his short stories, Less, Plus, was published on the magazine McSweeney’s issue 51.
