Giulia Caminito turns hypochondria into a portrait of a lost generation

Le Mal invisible, the latest novel by Italian author Giulia Caminito, centers on Loris, a man barely into his thirties whose chronic anxiety has curdled into full-blown hypochondria. According to Le Temps, the book renders his obsession with a precision the reviewer calls diabolical, playing it entirely straight, without the comic distance of Molière's Malade imaginaire or the ironic self-awareness of Italo Svevo's La Conscience de Zeno.

Loris imagines a nut lodged in his throat, an egg buried in his gut sending pain radiating outward, a heart that races without cause, a mole that suddenly seems suspect. Le Temps notes that he has constant access to medical forums and patient blogs that only confirm his grim self-diagnoses. "Je ne me sens pas bien," he repeats to an ever-shrinking circle of people willing to listen.

His job, underpaid and precarious, is at a publishing house in Rome, where his absences and mistakes draw constant complaints when he manages to show up at all. His relationship with Jo, his girlfriend since late adolescence — nicknamed after the heroine of Les Quatre Filles du docteur March — is fraying. Le Temps describes her as everything he is not: a body toned by yoga and climbing, pragmatic where he is cerebral, careful with money where he pours what little he has into vitamins, probiotics and medical tests.

Le Temps reads the novel as using Loris's illness as a symptom of something broader: a generation struggling to find its footing in the real world and to make the passage into adulthood.