Gloria grows up in a broken family. The father is Italian, works in construction. The mother is from Spain, she works night shifts in a factory. Family life is shaped by the arguments between the parents – and the blows from the father. The young girl’s only refuge is her older friend Chantal.
She lives, abandoned by her father, with her depressed and drug-dependent mother also in the small Swiss town of Rorschach. Chantal takes care of Gloria, stands in the way of her violent father. They spend their days together at the lake or in the Sixty Nine pub. This is where Chantal’s friend Mauro and his motorcycle club hang out.
Casting show as a stepping stone?
Chantal wants to get out of Rorschach and off to Zurich. There she would like to enable Gloria and herself a new, beautiful life. A life in freedom: “Free from the home, free from the authorities, free from the club and from everyone who has ever tried to dictate something to us,” she wishes. Chantal can sing, she practiced on the Sixty Nine stage. Mauro and the men from the club are convinced: she has talent. The boss of the motorcycle gang has contacts in the Zurich show scene, Chantal can take part in a Swiss casting show. She wins and moves into the international show “Eurostar”. The dream seems close enough to touch. But something goes wrong. The show doesn’t free Chantal. On the contrary: it is the end of it.
A world collapses for Gloria. The only thing that keeps them alive is the thought of revenge.
The author Giuseppe Gracia (54) came up with the idea for “Glorias Finale” while watching the Eurovision Song Contest in May 2018 with his 13-year-old daughter. “I was wondering what happens to the people who become stars overnight through show business – and then disappear from the scene again when they leave the scene overnight.” Just like Daniel Küblböck, who became famous in 2003 with “Deutschland sucht den Superstar”, left the company as the third to last, but nevertheless tried desperately to find support in the media world and finally disappeared from aboard a cruise ship in September 2018. The authorities assume a suicide.
People are products and consumers
How do the cogs of the show machinery turn? Gracia sends his heroine Gloria on her way to find out. Change the system. A system that is shaped by sexism, greed, envy. A system in which PR consultants, directors, producers and journalists pull the strings. Use people as “eye food”, driven by the viewer as a motor. “Gloria wants to kill the show. In the course of the novel, more and more questions are raised as to whether show business can be killed at all. Or whether in the end everything doesn’t turn out to be a show », summarizes the author.
Gracia holds up a mirror to the reader. «Our society is structured like a talent show. Everyone wants to be higher, faster, further – and present themselves in the process. ” Everyone can be their own show. Social media offers the right platform. “The problem is that people are products and consumers at the same time. It is a doom-loop.” When people get under the wheels of this machinery, love, friendship and life can be destroyed.