In “The bookshop on the hill” (Einaudi), the poet tells how she opened a bookshop in Garfagnana, recreating relationships and family ties
It is true that it draws an air of fairy tale in the diary-memoir of Alba Donatifrom the Pavesian title The library on the hill (Einaudi). And in this key we understand the epigraph of Vita Sackville-West placed at the beginning: «Once upon a time there was a queen who had a doll’s house … a doll’s house so wonderful that people came from all over to see it». The doll’s house is the bookstore of the title: not just any bookstore, but the Sopra la Penna bookshop that the “queen” Alba Donati set up in Lucignana, a Macondo of 180 souls in the Lucca Apennines. An independent bookshop that has risen to symbolize a confidential and friendly way of doing culture, a dollhouse so wonderful that people move from all over to go to see it and from all corners of the world they send “magical” objects for their customers. friends (especially readers), calendars by Emily Dickinson, socks with the words of Pride and Prejudice etc. The dream has come true on 7 December 2019 with a festive inauguration when Covid wasn’t there yet, and if there was no one could know. A wind of happiness is blowing but always threatened: for this reason, in addition to the fable, there is the echo of a famous poem by Montale that says the provisional nature of every conquest: «Happiness achieved, we walk for you / on the edge of a blade». After all, Montale hovers a little everywhere in the book of the poetess Alba Donati, president of the Vieusseux cabinet whose library was directed by the poet for a decade in the distant past. And Montale will be for Laura, Alba’s daughter, the subject of the final exams with which the story, on 11 June 2020, is about to close and ideally opens to the future of the generations to come. But here’s the walking su file in old what counts is that sense of conscious fragility in the fullness that glimmers in Alba Donati’s light writing, a writing as variable as the meteorology of the place.
So, Alba has decided to change her life, leaving Florence and a well-established press office job linked to culture and publishing, to return home, since she was born in Lucignana many years earlier, bringing with her the bittersweet memories of her childhood, the shame of having grown up in a house that did not have a bathroom, the emptiness of a father who had abandoned his family and left it to his fate. The diary starts on January 20 and ends on June 20, 2020: the worst five months of the pandemic, which coincide with a new life completely free of professional regrets but not free of shadows. The Bookshop Sopra la Penna is a challenge, a wooden building set up in a “wolf-proof fortress” (there it is the fairy tale) to become a crossroads that attracts people and stories from the present and the past. And they are people and stories that cross or have crossed the history of Alba. A crowd on which the centenary father and mother stand out, characters who from their real life have the strength to enter literature when they meet again after decades of distance.
Because the history of the Donati family, like that of many other families, is a story of abandonments and unexpected returns, of tears and mending. The “survivor” Alba proudly recognizes in herself the patience to be able to repair her damage: “I have patience, I work without attracting attention, it always seems that she is doing something else (…). It’s a job like any other, only that it takes a strong vocation. I, a bookshop from Lucignana, fix distant things ». He will repair the library after the fire of January 30, 2019 (about walking on the edge of a blade …). But among the things that she fixes, after many years, there is above all the relationship between the two parents, who find themselves in Lucignana as old men after many years of separation. In reality, Alba’s patient talent is also another: care. Often already in the morning we find her bent on the ground in the garden to caress the flowers, talking to the herbs, as George Sand did as a child.
Alba Donati’s diary is a tangle of threads (the life of the bookshop, family memories, readings, country stories) but it is above all the story of a salvation through homecoming, through dialogue with nature and above all with books. They are the protagonists of salvation, the books that attract a crowd of distant readers to the hill, who have come from unexpected places after long journeys. The books that make other books read in an infinite chain: “The only form of eternity we can experience is here on earth” is a phrase by Pia Pera, present in the book as a garden writer, as a writer and as a gardener, muse and cultivator of eternity.
Communication and trust are the key concepts. The crowdfunding that gives birth to the Lucignana bookshop is nothing more than a transmission of trust, solidarity and participation, word of mouth that triggers the love for a book and of which the library is the unstoppable engine. The engine that drives Alba Donati’s memoir is on the list of the “agendas” with which the days are closed. They are mostly surprising titles, endurance books, often rare, unobtainable, not the ones that fill the charts: «We have ‘our books’ … It’s like a home library …». Alba does not hesitate to be on the side of what she calls the books of consolation: literature also has a restorative function, for the characters she narrates and for the readers to whom she turns. “Arbitrary choices? Perhaps. How to divide the narrators from the narrators. It came instinctively. But then, on reflection, isn’t it something new in the last century that women write? And if they write after being silent for centuries they will surely have a lot of things to say and they will say them in new ways. So isn’t it logical that they should have a couple of shelves all to themselves? ‘ Logical or not, that’s fine. Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion, Jamaica Kincaid are the best known names. Others need to be discovered. The reader will find lots of tips for which to thank Alba Donati and the bookshop on the hill.
May 1, 2022 (change May 1, 2022 | 11:36 am)
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