“Life in your pocket” (Solferino) comes out on 25 October and tells the adolescence of the two protagonists: Malik puts his life on the line while Mattia plays with life
Let’s face it: when the news of shipwrecks arrives in the stretch of sea between Africa and Sicily, we do not go beyond the numbers, beyond accounting. No name remains in our heads, no history. Not even that of the 13-year-old boy, found with a report card sewn into his jacket. It was a doctor, Cristina Cattaneo, who revealed the discovery to the world. That image, so powerful and symbolic, sent a writer with the sensitivity of Simona Sparaco back to the helpless suffering of so many mothers.
The story of this book,
Life in your pocket
(Solferino)
, starts from Malik, the African boy to whom the author has decided to give a literary identity, and from his own journey in search of the future; and then intertwines with that of Mattia, struggling with another type of journey, the search for an identity.
The two stories move between bullying, baby gangs, night motorbike races, and human traffickers, lives lost in the dark, inadequate boats on stormy seas. The worlds that Simona Sparaco has staged tell solitudes that try to make their way into the cracks of life, and – although he has done a lot of research on where Malik departs, Mali, and the journeys people like him experience – his is not an immigration novel, nor is it a bullying novel. His focus is on the ancestral relationship between mothers and two children, in a new time increasingly marked by challenges and fears.
I protagonists of Life in your pocket
there are four: two little boys and their mothers. The kids are Malik, an African, and Mattia, an Italian. Malik loves reading and studying, he feels fulfilled in knowing things. Mattia, on the other hand, does not like to read or study and feels fulfilled in having the recognition of friends, even through social media.
Malik’s mother believes in the revolutionary power of education, so much so that she will go so far as to sew her report card full of high marks into the pocket of her son’s jacket. This woman, who loves her son to the point of depriving herself of it in order to try to give him a future better, she is wonderfully convinced that that report card will open the doors of Europe to him.
Mattia’s mother is a separated mother, a coroner who struggles between managing her son, alone, and work. The fates of these four characters will cross during a decisive night.
The book has an unusual genesis. It was supposed to be just a story to be attached to the Corriere for a charity initiative addressed to the school in the Third World started by Unicef (in fact the proceeds went entirely to charity). Simona Sparaco became passionate about the story to the point of drawing a novel from it, now published by Solferino, again for charity.
If on the one hand, as in Malik’s case, there is life at stake, on the other Mattia plays with life. Face up challenge per awaken emotions that otherwise seem dormant. You can’t find dreams, because you don’t know which way to look.
Luisa, Mattia’s mother, does a ruthless job, tries to give back an identity to the unnamed corpses. Her work takes away precious time to spend with her son, and as often happens the equilibrium mothers of these times are forced to delegate, sometimes to forget. Mattia asks for attention and mythologizes the absence of his father, which his mother tries to dilute with her lies; but it is also through the sometimes brutal truths of those who brought us into the world that we can build our identity. Mattia ends up taking for granted a right that the state recognizes, that of studying. It is no coincidence that both he and Malik are 13, the time when compulsory school ends.
In Malik’s school, the roof was made of sheet metal, then the missionaries replaced it with more resistant tiles. Notebooks and books are gifts from a distant world that we end up idealizing. Malik lives in a small house full of smells, where death, like life, is a daily reality. Malik knows what to dream, Mattia no longer knows, perhaps she never knew. The rest is tragedy, and hope.
October 24, 2022 (change October 24, 2022 | 20:48)
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