"La gare de temps. A lifetime's story"
by Guido Elias R. Contino
247 pages in e-book format (pdf)
Published by Glucksmann Books

"La gare de temps. Story of a Life" is an autobiographical novel (not an autobiography in the most strict meaning of this word, but rather a loose novel encompassing several episodes lived by its author) and the first book I have ever written. Started in August 2020, it took me almost a year to complete and then translated into English. It spans a time frame from my birth in 1978 to 2019, the year in which these events happened that prompted me to write it, both as a memoir and as a testimony to what I witnessed, in Italy and elsewhere, during a life that I might call reckless and at times even unfortunate; but not for the purpose of a recrimination of what ' happened during this time, but rather to draw a lesson from it that could serve me not to repeat the same mistakes of the past, and possibly to have a better life in the future. Too many places and people of my youth had a place in my soul and therefore I thought it right to remember them in this way. Hence the chapters on my childhood in Sicily in the 1980s; my youth in central Italy; and the long years of wandering in Italy and abroad, where all the places, people, and events are faithfully reported (without, however, ever mentioning names, but only initials) so as to reconstruct and preserve what has been my more or less remote. Not because this necessarily has to interest the reader (in fact, many may ask me : but why should we be interested in your life, since after all you are only forty years old ?), as much as because the way it is written could also possibly be an interesting experience from a narrative point of view, as if it were a kind of novel of formation; a kind of shortened, homely version of the Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Goethe's famous work translated into Italian under the title "The Wandering Years of Wilhel Meister"). In the hope that this may be a good good wishes to this work (and its readers).