Three young men—Davide, the protagonist, Licheri, and Corda—drag out their existence in a Sardinia far removed from the one known to tourists: the sun and the sea are there, but above all, there is boredom and a yearning to escape the provinces to experience the wider world.
All three have spent considerable time abroad falling in love with extraordinary women, dancers, but have returned disillusioned to their homeland, whiling away their days between nightclubs and petty thefts.
The protagonist, Davide, is thalassemic and therefore bound to constant blood transfusions.
Yet his illness is not the root of his mal de vivre: what weighs on him most heavily is his mother’s death and the unraveling of his family, marked by his father’s remarriage and the emotional—even spiritual—estrangement of his sister.
For the most part, the novel drifts between depictions of the three youths' nightlife, Davide’s memories of his adolescence and his life in London, fleeting love affairs, and episodes of petty delinquency: everything unfolds with lightness and resignation, devoid of anger, almost in acceptance of life’s futility.
Then events spiral: Davide sleeps with Daniela, one of the most beautiful girls at the club, and the two are caught by her boyfriend, who murders them.

The fundamental theme of the novel is what it means to be Sardinian:

often my friends and I would have dinner and smoke, holding forth on love and art, on being Sardinian and the meaning—or lack thereof—of this fortuitous element of our existence, on our desire to travel and understand the world, on our phobias and our aimlessness

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And it is precisely this need to transcend parochialism, “the identitarian and anti-identitarian paranoias,” that constitutes the book’s most compelling trait: in an Italy increasingly diminished and provincialized by the rhetoric of territory, this novel serves as an anthem—perhaps unintended by the author—to globalization, to an openness toward the world, to “accepting that we are like everyone else.”
It is no coincidence that Davide consistently refers to foreigners when speaking of other thalassemics: illness unites rather than divides.

Sorigo’s prose is highly idiosyncratic and innovative: the narrative unfolds without punctuation (or with faulty punctuation), as though the words tumble forth unchecked, staking everything on musicality and verbal juxtapositions.
The touchstone is poetry rather than prose.
This stylistic approach is occasionally effective, yet it renders the reading experience fragmented, eroding the novel’s overarching coherence and leaving it, in the end, as an assemblage of episodes and impressions.

Sardinia Blues