culture
twelve o’clock, April 14, 2021 – 20:18
The new novel by Giacomo Annibaldis closes a precious trilogy of memory
of Fabrizio Versienti
Arrivato his fourth novel with this recent “Shadows of clouds “, published by Edizioni di Pagina, Giacomo Annibaldis perseveres in his “folly” of writing, continuing to enrich his personal bibliography which already includes various essays on classical literature and myths, as well as Davanzati’s vampires and Daunian tarantulas. On the other hand, this is not surprising from a retired journalist who has governed or in any case “worked” for many years the cultural pages of Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno. His first fictional adventure was in 1999, with «Codes », but it is with the next «Popular house with sea view»(2007) that Annibaldis began to outline a clear poetic: a recovery of personal and collective memory to tell of marginal existences in a Bari that is itself small, provincial and” ancient “. Aided also by a conscious work on the language, which leads him to carry on the page a dialect that is not sweetened but not pedantically philological, skilfully mixed with a solid and elegant Italian. “A rock crystal”, the elderly Archangel Leone de Castris defined his book during an enthusiastic presentation at the Laterza bookshop.
The titles
Since then Annibaldis has deepened the subject by gradually shifting his “focus” from personal to collective memory: if in “The fault of the knife»(2013) were still the memories of a difficult childhood to guide the pen, in the latter “Shadows of clouds” literary invention is spreading, enriched by some references to the great History wisely kept on the sidelines of the story, as a background, a necessary context. The story of the Biancofiore family develops between the end of the first world war and the end of the second; it is not such a long period of time, we are talking about just thirty years, but how dense it is. The calendar places them more or less a century ago, and in fact the poverty of the Biancofiore and their neighbors is ancient, almost timeless. Male children go to war, girls instead get married, which in some ways is even worse, especially when they find themselves having to fix the many troubles caused by distracted husbands, elderly parents and children.
The wire
Maria Luigia is the thread that holds the story of the book together: a simple woman, who first has her husband stolen by her sister Rosaria and then tenaciously defends the family she forms with her new partner Leonardo, overcoming all kinds of troubles unscathed. Maria Luigia washes the clothes of the ladies who are doing better, and it is there, on the terraces where she lays, that she occasionally rests for a moment not thinking about anything, just watching the clouds pass. Life is cyclical, births, marriages and deaths follow one another; three generations pass, and the youngest already seem to belong to another world. But there is no sentimentality or fatalism in Annibaldis’ narrative. On the contrary, the author emphasizes how history is always able to disperse human events in a sudden and dramatic way: the riots and violence of rising fascism, the patronage of the regime, the harshness and follies of wars, the useless massacres such as that of via Niccolò dell’Arca, in 1943, when some students who were celebrating the fall of fascism on the street were shot dead, the passage of the king of Italy on the run, and finally the terrible explosion of the Henderson ship moored in the port, on 9 April 1945. And it is this last story that enters the book in an overbearing way, jumping out of the background to become a tragedy that upsets the family of Maria Luigia. Here ends Annibaldis’ “backward” trilogy, as the implications of the book define it. With it the author has perhaps made peace with his own personal history; certainly, he was able to give his city a series of narratives that contribute to reinventing its memory “from below”, as a humble and precious thing.
April 14, 2021 | 20:18
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