Even literary critics dream. They dream that the best is not in the past. Paolo Sorrentino’s first novel, Hanno tutti ragione, is that dream come true. It is the story of Tony Pagoda, a Neapolitan singer with a colorful past. We meet him in the early 1980s, in a blooming and wildly happy Italy. Tony is a picaresque hero: he has talent, money, women, and an extravagant lifestyle – but he is not superficial. Among his friends are both extraordinary and miserable specimens, all of whom teach him something along the way. With his exuberant and restless wisdom, Tony is like a contemporary Falstaff, comically revealing the true substance of humans, winners and losers alike. When life gets complicated, Tony seeks silence on a short tour in Brazil. The new setting appeals to him and he decides to stay: first in Rio, then Manaus, where he feels himself crowned by a new freedom (not to mention obsessed with cockroaches). He lives eighteen years in humid, Amazonian exile – and then someone offers to sign a check for an outrageously high sum to bring him back to Italy, where yet a new life awaits.

About Hanno tutti ragione, the critic Antonio D’Orrico has said: “After I had read this beautiful novel I thought of Ezra Pound, who saw the magnificence of Venice and asked God what kind of punishment humans should expect for such an early reward.”