Is there a genre that can be caged in the definition of “women’s literature”? The question raises many doubts, but not many men are trying to solve them. Instead, it is spoken of in courageous events such as the Inquiete Festival, born in Rome “to dedicate time and space to the talent, intelligence and creativity of today’s and past writers”. Elvira Serra, journalist of the “Corriere della Sera”, is a writer who participated in Inquiete in 2019 presenting The stars of Capo Gelsomino.
In the coming weeks she will be busy promoting her new novel,Everything to experience, published by Solferino. There is a character in Elvira Serra’s works, the participation with which she brings her female characters to life. It is a fever, an electric current, which probably derives from the years of journalistic activity and from the scruple with which she has always followed, told and interviewed the characters of real life. Mind you, no misunderstanding: on the one hand there is his excellent journalistic work, the result of curiosity and his professional rigor. Here is a novel where writing, plot and characters build that unmistakable texture that is called literature. The point of contact is precisely in the participation of the writer. In Everything to experience Elvira Serra makes us discover the life of four women, different in age, behavior and history, whose lives end up meeting united by an unpredictable embroidery of history. There are no heroines in this novel. There are women struggling with extraordinary impulses, intense emotions, voids that make you dizzy and falls without mediation. There are families, which we recognize immediately because, as happens in the best literature, this one can easily tell our own story. There are heartwarming generosities and meannesses that we have once again learned to recognize very early on. And there are men, with different roles and different characters. The best of them, throughout the novel, doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t need it.
Here, in the face of these personalities, their stories, errors as well as redemptions, the author is never detached. Scrolling through the pages you feel that the pathos of the protagonists has begun to beat in the heart of those who created them and has passed through their hands to type their faces, their thoughts, their pains on a keyboard.
In the novel everything starts from an apparent normality: we find Anna, a saleswoman in a fashion store in the center of Milan, in a moment of rest at Parco Sempione. Not far from her Agnese, a sad girl with a stroller, whom Anna has often seen in those parts and who suddenly asks her to keep her two-year-old child for a while. Agnese’s best friend, Lorenza, is a stewardess immersed in a tormented love affair with an overly famous and unreliable man. Finally we discover Luciana, director of the police station, who is divided between a demanding job and the hospital where her husband struggles with death while waiting for a transplant. Within a little over twenty-four hours, the lives of the four women are intertwined, in an ever more dense way.
Female portraits that emerge clear even in opaque moments, immersed in a Milan lived with the affection of those who came from afar and were welcomed without frills. Elvira Serra has the ability to make places speak and emerge deep interactions with the life of her characters. Sardinia cannot be missing, which the author carries in her blood and emotions, but the affectionate attention for Milan from via Sarpi to Moscova, at the rear entrance of the police station in via Montebello, from where the manager Luciana accesses her office, is striking. Little Leo is at ease, like many children, between Parco Sempione and the Aquarium. Even the Niguarda hospital, with all the drama of the stories it hosts, offers its most welcoming aspect.
It is not clear if there is a genre that can be called women’s literature. There is literature and talents capable of expressing it. Many of these talents bear the name of writers. Elvira Serra does not just tell the stories of her protagonists: she accompanies us in the world, in the joy and contradictions of relationships, in the necessary hope every day. It helps us question the mystery of failures and the shocks of happiness. He never gives answers, he delicately raises all the questions we expect from a novel. Which offers us the questions we often don’t have the courage to ask ourselves.
The author
Elvira Serra’s novel Everything to experience is published by Solferino (pp. 224, € 16.50). Elvira Serra was born in Nuoro in 1972. She is a writer and journalist for “Corriere della Sera” where she deals with news and costume, interviews and curates the “Polaroid” column. He also writes on the blog “The twenty-seventh hour”. Everything to experience is his fourth novel: he has already published The other one (Mondadori, 2004); You can’t stop the wind (Rizzoli, 2016), The stars of Capo Gelsomino (Solferino, 2019)
April 15, 2021 (change April 15, 2021 | 21:39)
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