2023-11-15 13:50:51
by ALDO CAZZULLO
The great French writer told in a book published by Neri Pozza which will be presented at BookCity
We all remember, also thanks to Giorgio Albertazzi, the Memoirs of Hadrian: as he begins to see the profile of death, the Roman emperor born in Spain and with a Greek heart writes to the seventeen-year-old whose talent he sensed, Marcus Aurelius, and retraces the great moments of his existence and of his Rome. But there is another troubled and exciting story that needed to be told as Eugenio Murrali did, writing the novel of the life itself of the author of the Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar. The book, Marguerite was here, just released by Neri Pozza, tells the parable of courage and talent of this author born one hundred and twenty years ago to become the first immortal woman, thanks to her entry into the French Academy, but above all thanks to works that you want to read or reread after having read the pages written by Murrali, an authentic declaration of love.
The author – almost an adopted son for Dacia Maraini, whose Meridiano he edited – dealt with many forms of writing, pieces of theater criticism, book reviews, interviews, essays, and lastly, in addition to teaching in the high school of Tivoli dedicated to Hadrian, collaborates in hosting a radio news program in Latin for the Vatican media. His novel about Marguerite Yourcenar is the debut of a true writer, for the originality of his narrative construction and style, for his ability to communicate emotions, to create images, to bring to life the people close to the writer, giving them the floor .
The novel has two levels. One is the intimate travel diary of a narrator who visits the places of Marguerite Yourcenar: Brussels, the city she was born in, Mont Noir, in French Flanders, where as a child she spent the first summers of her life with her father Michel and the fearsome grandmother Nomi, Holland and the North Sea, the Mediterranean countries, America, which welcomed her at the outbreak of the Second World War and gave her a new citizenship.
The other dimension of the book is what is defined as exofiction, a narrative constructed starting from characters or historical facts told in the form of a novel. From the narrator Murrali moves on to important figures in Marguerite’s life. She gives voice to her mother, Fernande, who talks about herself with great force before dying of septicemia a few days after giving birth. She brings up her father, Michel, the inspirer of the writer’s great love for letters and the ancient world, a perfect travel companion. They say their Barbe, the nanny who acts as her mother, the wicked grandmother Nomi, who here shows her hidden and complicated humanity, Andr, the homosexual intellectual who makes Marguerite lose her mind, until she, to free herself from this passion, creates a wonderful book, Fires, in which he alternates rewritings of the myth with short prose or epigrams flaming with passion: I’m tired: I walked all night, trying to throw away your memory.
Here in Marguerite there was an important space dedicated to Grace, the faithful companion who lives for forty years alongside the writer, translates her books, rereads the drafts, forces her to revise several times a sentence that still doesn’t sound as it should, organizes the his agenda, finds with her the house of Petite Plaisance, Maine, the refuge for their love and for Marguerite’s writing. Finally, a new ferocious passion will arrive, Jerry, a young homosexual destined to die early, struck by AIDS. A very painful loss which the writer survived for just over a year. Yourcenar passed away in 1987, after a cerebral hemorrhage.
While this life of travels, loves, big stories and small stories that intertwine is told, the writer’s masterpieces appear in filigree: Alexis, a youthful and already perfect work, in which Yourcenar imagines the letter of a husband who declares to his wife one’s homosexuality; Coin of the dream, set in Rome in 1933, in the midst of the fascist era, and centered on an attempted attack against Mussolini, in the name of freedom; The work in black and its protagonist, the alchemist and philosopher of sixteenth-century Flanders, Zeno, whom the author considers a brother, a being to whom she gave body, so much so that she noted the date of his death among her personal notes, to remember him as you do with someone you love.
Murrali in this dense and magnetic book on which he worked so hard, reading all the works, biographies and letters available, shows a strong feeling of admiration and respect for the woman and the writer. There is not a shadow of gossip, but only a fascinating, visionary dialogue with a great spirit of the twentieth century, a tribute to a model who helps us to better understand who we are, to an intellectual who has demonstrated exceptional freedom and sets herself the strict self-discipline of improving herself and her novels, which she has continued to refine at times over the years. In 2037, fifty years after her death, many now classified letters will be visible; yet if Eugenio Murrali had had them at hand perhaps she would not have written this book differently, because on every page you can feel the tension that binds him to Marguerite Yourcenar. To say it with her: There is something between us that is better than love: complicity.
The meetings in Rome and at BookCity Milan
Eugenio Murrali’s novel, Marguerite was here, in bookshops for Neri Pozza (192 pages, 17 euros). Journalist and essayist, Eugenio Murrali (Rome, 1985) with Paolo Di Paolo edited the Meridiano dedicated to novels and short stories by Dacia Maraini (Mondadori, 2021). With Dacia Maraini he published The Dream of Theatre. Time.news of a passion (Bur, 2013). Murrali will present his book on Friday 17 November in Rome in dialogue with Sandra Petrignani, readings by Mariangela D’Abbraccio (6pm, Galleria Nazionale, Sala delle Colonne, Viale delle Belle Arti 131) and on Sunday 19th in Milan on the occasion of BookCity, with Anna Folli (11am, Il Trittico bookshop, via San Vittore 3).
November 15, 2023 (modified November 15, 2023 | 12:58)
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