The tale of a long and rich life in the age of fragments. Thanks, Kathryn Scanlan

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Kathryn Scanlan is one of the most interesting voices on the contemporary American literary scene . In an era where everything is either an experience or it isn't, where you watch a concert through your phone screen, and if you don't post in Stories, you have no story, this young (born in 1980) but already successful writer—she has won, among others, the Windham-Campbell Prize—works against the grain. Indeed, Scanlan shapes her stories around the biographies of others, that is, experiences recounted and evaluated over the long term: the exact opposite of the fragmentation and temporariness to which social media has accustomed us.

He did so with the diary of an elderly woman on which he based his first novel, Aug 9 – Fog. And the same goes for Kick the Latch (2022), recently – and deservedly – ​​brought to Italy by il Saggiatore with the title Cavallo scosso (2025). The latter is born from the reworking of three interviews conducted with Sonia, a sixty-year-old family friend, who has spent a lifetime in the equestrian circuit as a horse trainer. And Scanlan's prose also gallops, a triumph of parataxis that would make a jackhammer envious, which flies by in a fugue of memories-impressions like the landscape seen from the window of a high-speed train: in the blink of an eye you've already arrived at your destination, book closed in hand, almost as if Sonia's journey were your own.

Sonia's life is one that can only unfold in the United States: grappling with a dream bigger than herself, that of horses, which over time—especially when she grows too tall to hope to be a jockey—turns into passion, then into a Stations of the Cross, death, and resurrection. Sonia travels throughout the States, moving from one circuit to another, from the most run-of-the-mill stables to those of billionaires. Above all, she spends her years among a harlequin crowd of derelicts, drug addicts, rapists, Samaritans with guns, con artists, wounded colleagues, and many who "have remained": the diverse humanity that peppers (and festers in) the world of horse racing, not the glittering one one might imagine, but a reality of chilling harshness; a place where a woman has to work twice as hard to carve out her own place, sleeping in the stable and waking up at four in the morning, sometimes finding a colleague lying on top of her at gunpoint.

However, it's not just the dramatic undercurrent of Sonia and her companions' story that's striking, but above all the enormous dimension of this woman's vocation: a life entirely spent with and for horses, through which she rediscovers herself as a more fully functioning woman. "My horse raised me," Sonia proclaims at the beginning of the novel: the following pages are nothing but the realization of this statement. A feverishness for life that infects the language: "Those who work at the racetrack don't say 'we won' a race. They say 'we win.' It's not grammatically correct. It's not 'we won.' It's not 'we will win.' The race is over, it's already won, but we say 'we win, we win, we win.'" In the drama (the "shaken horse" is the wild one that swoops down on you), fulfillment. Long live Sonia (and Scanlan), the antidote to Instagram.

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