2023-11-24 20:51:12
by ROBERTA SCORRANESE
The mystery Soledad (Einaudi Free Style), a new investigation in the series on the commissioner who investigates in the twenty-year period. This time a crime in Christmas 1939, the last of peace
Perhaps we like Inspector Ricciardi so much because he is far from us. Far away in time, so painfully transplanted into the twenty years of fascism, forced to experience, despite himself, the horror of dictatorship in its most hidden aspects. And reading Soledad. A December by Inspector Ricciardi (Einaudi Free Style), the new novel in the most famous series written by Maurizio de Giovanni, brings to mind the verses of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, those that go like this: sweet, while the surface of the vast sea is agitated/ from the winds, contemplate from the ground the great toil of others;/ not because someone’s suffering is a happy pleasure,/ but because it is sweet to understand from what misfortunes you are free. The comforting perception of witnessing something terrible but happening to someone else.
Here, Soledad, from the first pages, drags us into an abyss that is still invisible, but clearly perceptible: we are approaching Christmas in the year of grace 1939, Naples gathers around the warmth of domestic environments. It’s true, fascist rhetoric knows no impermeable ravines, for Brigadier Raffaele Maione can still afford a grimace of disappointment when, at the table, his wife Lucia tells him that his son has gone from Balilla to Avanguardista and has changed from this to that.
Ricciardi is more alone than ever. Not even her little Marta’s liveliness can alleviate the intense and vivid memory of Enrica. Her voices take on a stentorian quality and all the winter melancholy that can only be felt in Naples close to Christmas seems to pour onto her suddenly aged shoulders. Of course, sooner or later it had to happen: the ringing of the phone, the rush to a neighborhood that had seen better moments, despite the redevelopment. The apartment on the main floor of an ancient building, the door that opens, the dining room and then the landslide towards human misery: in a dirty bed there is an old woman with lifeless hair and a thread of drool falling from her mouth astonished. She is the mother and she still doesn’t know that a few meters away from her, in the bright room well furnished by a person full of taste, lies the body of her murdered daughter. When she is informed, the old woman collapses on the sheet and only says: And now who will clean my bed? How am I going to do it until tomorrow morning?
The beauty of the Inspector Ricciardi series lies largely in the gaze with which Luigi observes the world. as if he were showing it to us through a very personal glass and, therefore, we too feel immersed in his special melancholy. That hypersensitivity that we have learned to know and that has accompanied us until this last Christmas of peace. But in Soledad there is something that goes beyond, something that can be felt right from the beginning: If I could do it, I would talk to you about loneliness. The introversion of the most famous commissioner in Italy is now a trait we know (also because, in the homonymous television series on Rai, the actor Lino Guanciale transformed it into a facial crease poised between bitterness and sarcasm) .
Yet, in this 1939, loneliness becomes a creeping anxiety. He didn’t remember a time like that. Suspended between the real condition and the one that was desired or boasted so much, and so well, that one believed it to be true. Bruno Modo (anti-fascist medical examiner, ed.) repeated to him that it was a scam served by the government to poor people, and mockingly wondered whether or not imperial grandeur was a good accompaniment and whether it satisfied the hungry children who arrived at the hospital every day.
Almost seventeen years have passed since the release of the first volume of the series and many things have happened to Ricciardi. The love for Enrica, the (unsuccessful) courtship by Livia, the birth of Marta, the attraction for Bianca. And then Rosa, Nelide, Bambinella. Surrounded by a group of female characters, Ricciardi has so far been able to temper his melancholy between feelings and work successes.
But as we reach the last year of peace, the regime is at a point of no return, even the dead – those who speak to Luigi – seem more alone. Soledad the photography of an era. Brigadier Maione with his multitude of children, in his gaze the shadow of pain for the one of them he had lost; and Doctor Modo, who hissed his uneasiness towards fascism and the government but who had become more prudent, terrified as he was by arrests and confinement. There is Rachele, the wife of deputy commissioner Angelo Garzo, forced to clarify that the recently enacted racial laws do not concern her (no one knows that I… of my origin, I mean. We go to mass, we are known, we have many important friends).
an Italy in the balance that opens this novel, an Italy suspended. And one had to be so alone in the face of the unknowable. Therefore the murder of Erminia Cascetta also takes on particular contours. Erminia was not a girl like all the others. She was full of life and wanted to live it her way. The gossip from the building, that expensive car that came to pick her up almost every evening, the elegant clothes and refined perfumes that she wore even though she officially didn’t have a job. Erminia was also alone. Erminia was also fighting her very personal private battle for a bit of freedom.
The stories of this novel come together to form a vivid portrait of Naples on the eve of the war and Ricciardi, to solve the case, will have to face the most fearsome ghost of all, the one contained in the question he asks himself for the first time after many years. : Why me?. Why does the Event happen to him, that is, why do the dead speak to him? The solution to the mystery will start from this question. And, perhaps, the dawn of a new Ricciardi, stronger and more steadfast within the swirl of distant voices that overlap in his mind.
Meetings with the author
Maurizio De Giovanni will be in Turin on 23 November (9pm, Grattacielo Intesa) with the show Passione (co-production Banca Intesa and The Italian Literary Agency); on 30 November in Rome (5pm, Libreria Nuova Europa – I Granai), on 3 December in Terni (6pm, Umbria libri, Municipal Library); two meetings with Soledad show: December 4th in Rome (9pm, Teatro Manzoni) and December 10th in Florence (6.30pm, Teatro Odeon).
November 22, 2023 (modified November 22, 2023 | 6:37 pm)
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