The Polycrates Syndrome

Artur has an unspectacular, well-ordered marriage with Rita, a middle school teacher, and although he is an academic, he works in a copy center and as a tutor, and is generally not particularly ambitious or demanding. Until one day a certain Alice enters the copy store and leaves a note ... What now gets rolling is downright funny for a while, but this comedy unexpectedly takes on increasingly dark, eventually gruesome forms, as if sprung from a splatter movie, and the novel's characters, hitherto so sated and contented, perhaps even happy, find themselves inevitably entangled in actions that neither they nor the readers would ever have thought them capable of. 'We're all doing far too well. The children should have it better for once'. The short text 'The Good Parents' from Antonio Fian's book of poems Finished Poems sums up the Polycrates Syndrome: the increase of too much happiness is possibly the greatest possible unhappiness. At least that is what a fear deeply rooted in us says - and this fear and its consequences are at the center of Fian's second novel.