Tablet Food for Tropical Fish

What you hold in your hands is a strange “aquarium-book” in which all the characters swim like fish in the same water, their paths crossing or missing each other by a few pages. At first glance, at the center of this roundelay of encounters and missed connections seems to be Bruno, a depressed thirty-year-old who has just broken up with his girlfriend and has an all-too-special relationship with his fish. He sleeps over at friends’ places, eats scamorza cheese at trattorias, and doesn’t yet know that he’s about to enter a different dimension. All it takes is an upside-down house number—a 6 instead of a 9—and his home, just like his life, will no longer belong to him.

On closer inspection, Bruno and all the others struggle and get stuck in the sand of the present, constantly stirred up by what might be nothing more than a puppeteer—or perhaps something more: a sort of deceptive Freudian superego that steers their destinies toward an end that may not even exist, playing dirty tricks or reshuffling their cards. All around them, a lightbulb on the verge of burning out, a hole in the drywall engaged in a complicated genealogical reconstruction, and even the deep-seated consciousness of a house that takes a certain pleasure in being vandalized by a thief. Inanimate objects, animals—everything seems to both corroborate and refute hypotheses, add new perspectives, and move the narrative forward.

In her debut, Alice Sivo crafts a book where reality is fantastical and vice versa—a small world of fake seaweed and seashells, where we find ourselves looking up, waiting for our compressed food pellets.