2023-05-15 22:24:32
On May 16 “The secret of Lieutenant Giardina” (Rizzoli) is released, a story on the salvific value of memory. The presentation on the 18th at the Turin Book Fair
It’s amazing how much our grandparents wrote in the trenches of the Great War. In a country of illiterates, diaries of great human intensity remain. Just the missing pages of the diary of a little officer are the leitmotif to the new, compelling novel by Giovanni Grasso, Lieutenant Giardina’s secret (Rizzoli), which comes out on Tuesday 16 May and will be presented on Thursday 18 at the Turin Book Fair. Unlike the previous two novels — The Kaufman case e Icarus, the flight over Rome —, based on the study of documents of historical events that actually happened, this time Grasso prefers a contemporary setting, following in the footsteps of two restless spirits: that of Luce Di Giovanni, a young and determined self-made architect after a childhood of loneliness and hardships, and that of Marco Grillo, a lonely, light-hearted and melancholy journalist, who lives in the old Roman house, immersed in the memories, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious, of a large but practically extinct family of Sicilian origin.
Luce, who works in a prestigious architectural firm in Paris, returns to the outskirts of Rome for the funeral of her grandmother, with whom she lived, together with her twin, for many years, after her mother’s death and her father’s second marriage to a impossible woman. In her will, her grandmother begged her to locate her father’s grave, Antonio, an infantryman in the First World War, who presumably fell in August 1916 in the many and fruitless battles for the capture of Cima Bocche (Dolomiti di Fassa), and of which all trace has been lost. Grandma’s great wish is that Luce bring a flower to the unknown grave of her great-grandfather.
The only clue in the young woman’s hands is the letter in which the company lieutenant, Gaetano Giardina, announces to the family the heroic death of infantryman Antonio. Luce manages to track down Lieutenant Giardina’s nephew: it’s Marco, who jealously keeps his grandfather’s war diary. The two will discover that some pages of the manuscript have mysteriously disappeared: and they are precisely those that refer to the days of 1916 in which Antonio may have fallen. The story, from this point on, unfolds like a detective story, with several twists and turns. A historical-family thriller that will find its solution only after an existential journey between Sicily and the Dolomites. A sort of modern odyssey, populated by Italian characters: from the courageous anti-mafia prosecutor to the eccentric great-aunt, from the merciless friar to the collector of war relics. If Luce, at the end of the journey, finally discovers what fate befell her great-grandfather, Marco will learn, not without pain, the missing piece in the history of his parents and, in particular, in the dramatic suicide of his father, afflicted since childhood by serious psychic disturbances.
The form of the novel develops through an original narrative expedient: the author alternates, in the different chapters, pages of the lieutenant’s war diary with the events of Luce and Marco. Two stories on different levels – historical, temporal, contextual – which will line up gradually until they join and overlap.
In the part dedicated to the lieutenant’s memorial, the very harsh living conditions of Italian soldiers during the Great War are described with raw realism: deaths, blood, fatigue, mud, horrible mutilations, iron and ruthless discipline. Among heartless generals, good-natured officers, fanatical volunteers, unaware but courageous soldiers devoted to sacrifice, the figures of Lieutenant Giardina stand out for their sense of humanityintellectual sui
generisamateur astronomer, and of the infantryman Antonio, illiterate but gifted with a rare ability to think: both convinced of the need to make a glimmer of human mercy survive, even amidst hatred, fear and violence.
A relationship of respect and deep friendship develops between the two, which will lead to a completely surprising ending. In the background, the fearsome and impregnable Cima Bocche, a barren pyramid of black rock above the San Pellegrino Pass, on whose slopes the lives of hundreds of young Italians have vainly bled to death. Almost a symbol a petrified metaphor of horrors meaningless and hopeless of war.
In the sections dedicated to contemporary events, however, two lives and two distant, if not opposite, characters are outlined with vivacity and depth. Luce’s effort – materialistic, “concrete”, brazen and even tinged with a thread of opportunism – is all aimed at conquering the space she believes she deserves in the world. “immature” Catholic, by his own admission, Marco lives with the ghosts of his own family history, shading them into a continuous exercise of irony and self-irony, capable of alternating fulminating jokes with philosophical reasoning. Luce and Marco are two souls in pain, destined to conflict, to quarrel, to bicker, but – as often happens to opposites – to fatally attract each other.
The dialogues between Lieutenant Giardina and Infantryman Antonio and those between Luce and Marco, alternating between comic and dramatic registers, touch – between the snowy trenches, a frenetic Rome, a surreal Sicily and the magical quiet of the Dolomites – some of the antinomies questions of man from the beginning of time: life and death, faith and doubt, balance and madness, law and morality, duty and the sense of humanity, love and war. The Mystery of Lieutenant Giardina
is, ultimately, a novel on the saving value of memory, as the ability to feel compassion, and to restore meaning and dignity to the little forgotten protagonists of great history as well as individuals who move disoriented in the jungle of contemporary relationships in the perennial search for themselves.
The meeting at the Book Fair
Giovanni Grasso will present his novel on Thursday 18 May at the Turin International Book Fair (Sala Blu, Pavilion 5, 4 pm) with Cristina Cassar Scalia. Born in Rome in 1962, Grasso is currently adviser for the press and communication of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella. Author of several essays, including biographies of Oscar Luigi Scalfaro and Piersanti Mattarella, Grasso has made documentaries for Rai. He has also published two novels: The Kaufman case (Rizzoli, 2019) and Icarus, the flight over Rome (Rizzoli, 2021)
May 15, 2023 (change May 15, 2023 | 21:18)
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