If the “chronicles from the eighties” that constituted the mundane fabric of A Postmodern Weekend entrusted their truth to the experience of the everyday lived at a level of thought that becomes writing in its very confrontation with new myths, this extreme, final. Abandonment, written in parallel, in counterpoint, sinks the blade of inquiry into our end of the century from a barely imperceptibly different side.

And the diversity is minimal, precisely, because Pier Vittorio Tondelli, however he faces the world around him, cannot renounce his vocation as a storyteller. Whether he is traversing a country, exploring a city, meeting characters, or forming a confidential relationship, Tondelli experiences everything as an adventure, and he cannot refrain from transforming himself, each time, from observer to protagonist. And so is born a tale in which the writing acts within itself and operates between shatterings and illuminations, with dry cuts of disconcerting infiltration.

Abandonment thus appears to us as a series of fragments of life that coagulate into emotions, moods, reflections, where all experience is participated in and narrated, seamlessly. Tondelli’s – to paraphrase Eluard – is an “interrupted tale,” which perhaps not even death could truncate: as far as it leaves behind, at least, as a model of “inner” writing.

(From the back cover of the first edition of The Abandonment)