Let the Games Begin by Niccolò Ammaniti Read Free Book Online Page B

the chandeliers.
    Fabrizio drew near carefully. ‘I beg your pardon . . .’
    The old Indian turned around, saw him and smiled, showing off a set of teeth too perfect to be real.
    â€˜Please, take a seat.’
    Fabrizio felt like a child who'd been sent for by the headmaster.
    â€˜How's it going?’ Fabrizio asked in his high-school English, as he sat down opposite Sawhney.
    â€˜Well, thank you.’ Then the Indian thought again. ‘To tell you the truth, I'm a little tired. I can't sleep. I suffer from insomnia.’
    â€˜I don't, luckily.’ Fabrizio realised that he had nothing to say to the man.
    â€˜I read your book. A little hastily, on the aeroplane, I do beg your pardon . . .’
    Fabrizio coughed out a suffocated ‘And?’ He was about to hear the verdict of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the most important writers in the world. The man who had the best press reviews of anyone in the last ten years. A part of Fabrizio's brain wondered whether he really wanted to hear it.
    I bet he hated it .
    â€˜I liked it. A lot.’
    Fabrizio Ciba felt a shot of well-being float through his body. A sensation like what a drug addict feels when he injects himself with good-quality heroin. A sort of beneficial heat that made the back of his neck tingle, slid down across his jaw, shut his eyes, slipped between his gums and his teeth, went down his trachea, it spread out pleasantly boiling hot like Vicks VapoRub from his sternum to his spine, through his ribs, and skipped from one vertebra to another until it reached his pelvis. His sphincter tensed briefly and goosebumps shot up his arms. A warm shower without getting wet. Better than that. A massagewithout being touched. While this physiological reaction – which lasted a few seconds – took place, Fabrizio was blind and deaf, and when he snapped back to reality Sawhney was talking.
    â€˜ . . . places, facts and people are unaware of the force that wipes them away. Don't you agree?’
    â€˜Yes, certainly.’ He answered. He hadn't heard anything at all. ‘Thank you. You've made me happy.’
    â€˜You definitely know how to keep the reader interested, how to move the best chords of your sensitivity. I would like to read something you've written that's a bit longer.’
    â€˜ The Lion's Den is my longest work. I've recently . . .’ – it was actually five years ago – ‘ . . . published another novel, Nestor's Dream , but that is also quite short.’
    â€˜How come you don't venture further? You most certainly have the expressiveness to do so. Don't be scared. Let yourself go without fear. If I may give you a piece of advice, don't hold yourself back, let yourself be taken by the story.’
    Fabrizio had to stop himself from hugging that dear adorable old man. How true what he had said was. Fabrizio knew he was capable of writing THE GREAT NOVEL. What's more, THE GREAT ITALIAN NOVEL, like I promessi sposi to be exact, the book the critics said was missing in our contemporary literature. And after various attempts, he had begun work on a saga about a Sardinian family, from the seventeenth century until the present day. An ambitious project that was definitely much stronger than the Gattopardo or I Viceré .
    Fabrizio was about to tell Sawhney all this, but a little humility held him back. He felt obliged to return the compliments. So he began inventing: ‘I wanted to tell you that your novel had me literally inspired. It is an extraordinarily organic novel and the plot is so intense . . . How do you do it? What is your secret? It has a dramatic energy that left me shaken for weeks.The reader is not only called on to weigh the consciousness and innocence of these powerful female characters, but, through their stories, how can I say it . . .? Yes, the reader is forced to transfer your point of view from the pages of the book to his own reality.’
    â€˜Thank