The 1980s outside the chorus

It is not nostalgia for the 1980s. But a journey into a parallel world that left its mark, made up of youth and music, and a desire to break out of the mould and cages. And breaking with those who marginalised the 'outliers'. Those whom the groups called the unworthy. 'Unworthy because maybe they didn't have a designer jacket' or because they wore 'Addas shoes'. Livio, the son of professors and from a middle-class family in Cagliari, also felt caged. That is why, at 16 and without shoes, he left home, dreaming of Florence. Where even the unconventional could find a place of their own. And it was on that journey that his new life began. Livio is the protagonist of 'Gli indegni' (The Unworthy), the latest novel (published by Einaudi Stile libero) by journalist and writer Francesco Abate from Cagliari.

Livio is unable to conform to his peers and the world that populates Cagliari. In between, there is music, the desire to find an environment where he can be welcomed and accepted. The red thread of the book, which is not autobiographical but recounts the common feeling and aspirations of young people, is the music of the 1980s concert where he escapes and meets the magnetic Anais. The girl he falls in love with and with whom he begins a journey into the world where he feels welcome. She initiates him into drugs, into fun beyond all limits, into sexual freedom, dragging him into a new era of his existence, from punk to house music, from gay clubs to crowded rainbow discos. Then he loses it and finds it again, between Cagliari, London and Paris. Livio is not one but the young people of the 1980s. 'Let's be clear, this is not a nostalgic journey,' Abate premises, 'but the point about what the 1980s were like for the young people of the time, who are the ones who are going into early retirement today. A journey that resumes the one begun when, as a young contributor to l'Unione Sarda Abate wrote a two-part story on young people. Then the silence and the passing years. And the decision to take up that work again. "I told myself if I get to be 60,' he says, 'it is the right time. Because at this age there is no more complacency or melancholic rhetoric about the past'.

Francesco Abate, Gli indegni, Edizioni Einaudi Stile libero, 384 pages, 20 euro