2023-08-10 23:24:41
by Ida Bozzi
In May, the writer’s announcement to the Corriere: “I have a terminal illness”. She was 51 years old
The writer Michela Murgia died today. She was 51 years old. He had revealed her illness, stage four kidney cancer, in an interview with Aldo Cazzullo last May (“Cancer isn’t something I have; it’s something I am”, she said on that occasion to Courier). On 11 June, Murgia announced his withdrawal from public meetings. In mid-July she had married “in articulo mortis” Lorenzo Terenzi (1988), actor, director and musician. With her best known novel, «Accabadora» (Einaudi, 2009), she had won the Campiello prize. Her latest book, «Three bowls. Rituals for a year of crisis» (Mondadori, 2023), immediately entered the top of the charts of best-selling volumes.
He knew how to move from reflection on spirituality to social and political analyses, even lively polemics, on the modern temptations of fascism. She practiced her commitment to gender equality with stubborn naturalness, she was proud of her “queer family” gathered in a house with four “soul” children, as she called them, and also carried high the flag of her native Sardinia and of the civilizations Sardinian matriarchies rich in tradition and unacknowledged, to which he had given voice with his best-known novel, Accabadora (Einaudi, 2009), with which he had won the Campiello 2010 prize.
The writer Michela Murgia has passed away, due to the tumor that had already put her to the test a few years ago: she was one of the newest and most influential voices in contemporary Italian literature. It had been important, that she Accabadora of her, because she had paved the way for the contemporary rediscovery of female cultures, only later also traveled by other writers and other writers of the new generations.
Just a few months ago, then, on May 6, 2023, she revealed her illness to Aldo Cazzullo during an interview with Corriere della Sera: stage four kidney cancer that left her with little time. She had also announced it in a more indirect way in her latest book, Three bowls. Rituals for a year of crisis (Mondadori, 2023), which immediately entered the top of the book rankings and still ranks among the top places, a novel of short stories in which he had faced the sudden cracks that distort lives, mourning, pain, broken loves: in the first of those stories he had narrated precisely the shock of the discovery of the disease.
In recent weeks, the rapid deterioration: on 11 June he announced his withdrawal from public meetings, and in mid-July he married Lorenzo Terenzi “in articulo mortis”, “to have rights that there was no other way to obtain so quickly”. She had published the images of the wedding on social networks, asking readers: «No wishes, because the ritual we would have liked does not yet exist. But it will exist and we want to help bring it to life».
Born in Cabras, in the province of Oristano, on 3 June 1972, after religious studies and activity within Catholic Action, Murgia was a religion teacher for a long time, but she held various “precarious” jobs which provided inspiration for a blog, which later became a book-complaint, both ironic and dramatic, The world must know. Tragi-comic novel of a precarious telephonist (Isbn, 2008; then Einaudi, 2017), on the world of telemarketing, which became a film by Paolo Virzì in 2008 with the title Entire life ahead. One of the first voices to denounce the discrimination of the precariat, and of the female precariat in particular. In 2008, Einaudi published a literary guide to places in Sardinia, Viaggio in Sardegna. Eleven routes on the island that cannot be seen, but it is with the major novel, from 2009, that Murgia traces the portrait of Sardinia truly invisible and unknown to most: we are in the territory of literature, the one traveled by Elsa Morante who told of Italy and the war, and its women and mothers, in the secret and daily lives in his History, or by Dacia Maraini in Marianna Ucrìa’s long life.
Accabadora is the story of an old woman who in a Sardinian village secretly kills seriously ill people who ask for it, and of a little girl whom the woman adopts and who gradually discovers the true purpose of her adoptive mother’s nocturnal outings. . The novel, which in addition to the Campiello Prize, obtained the Dessì and the SuperMondello, brings the writer to the fore. And the reasons are numerous: it is a novel of atmospheres and rarefactions, which highlights a narrative style close to magical realism; it is a literary but also an ethno-anthropological discovery, of research in the traditions of the peasant and Sardinian civilization, which reveals the most ancient and irregular female knowledge, close to science and medicine, even if not recognized; and it is a book that she knows how to deal with, speaking of the 1950s in the most hidden Sardinia, a topic that is still current today, and universal, that of euthanasia.
Many followers of Murgia, after that novel, which has somehow revealed how much archaic cultures tell the roots of the contemporary world, and how much in the small worlds of the immense Italian province women have been able to carve out an authoritative role, mysteriously unacknowledged by modernity . It is not surprising if, after the novel, Murgia has become one of the best known and most listened to female voices, and also attacked, on the most diverse media, on television or on social media as a commentator, with controversies that have made noise: one on her use of the schwa, the neutral vowel that includes all genders. Another, on the occasion of her wedding, in the tweet of the former Northern League senator Simone Pillon: «Michela Murgia has decided to get married defining marriage as “patriarchal and limited”. Michela, you had many alternatives, but you chose marriage. Perhaps because you know that it is the highest form of recognizing the love between a man and a woman». Or again on Saturday 5 August, when you argued with the mayor of Ventimiglia over the use of the surveillance service to prevent migrants from using the toilets and fountains at the Ventimiglia cemetery, speaking of a “fascist regime”.
Perhaps for this reason his books have become increasingly committed, obstinate, to perfect the narrative work of the feminine and the construction of a society of freer relationships, just as those within his queer family were free: the firm voice di Murgia seems to have long preferred the non-fiction text, which allows the writer to tell the modern time and to become proactive, committed, that of an activist. As in Ave Maria. And the church invented the woman (Einaudi, 2011), in which as a believer and theology scholar the author conducts a meticulous investigation on the feminine in the Gospel, but also in the contemporary pop of advertising and magazines, in search of clichés and of the distortions of the female image. Or like L’ho uccisa perché l’amavo (false!) (with Loredana Lipperini, Laterza, 2013), in which he takes the floor around the so-called «toxic love», that of women’s mistreatment, violence and deaths, for explain that even starting from words you can change the world.
Attention to language was central to Murgia, and not only with regard to schwa, even in the last few weeks, in which his messages on social media continued with the same clear and serene firmness as always. Always precise words, chosen with care, as he explained in the May interview with Cazzullo, when he said he didn’t like concepts such as “fighting the disease” or “fighting cancer”: “I don’t recognize myself in the war register”. The words had to be changed because words come from deeds, as he also demonstrated in Stay Shut up, and nine other sentences that we no longer want to hear (Einaudi, 2021): the serenity and strength with which he faced the last months of suffering are also from these choices.
Among the questions Murgia deals with most often is the coexistence of apparently irreconcilable elements, such as faith and sexual freedom (and themes such as feminism, euthanasia, abortion…), to which she offered her answer in God save the Queer. Feminist Catechism (Einaudi Stile libero, 2022): it is another key to his experience, which he shares in the essay, that is queerness, understood not as diversity or strangeness as the dictionaries say, but as a “threshold” and openness. She had also supported him in July, on the occasion of her wedding, as a legacy: “Our personal experience today is more political than ever, and if I could leave a symbolic legacy, I would like it to be this: another model of relationship”.
Numerous presences in anthologies and editorial collections; one for all, in Sei per la Sardegna (Einaudi, 2014) with the story The legacy. And there are still numerous narrative tests, such as the «short» The meeting (Corriere della Sera, 2011; then Einaudi, 2012), the novel Chirú (Einaudi, 2015) and We are storm (Salani, 2019).
But the look at the “thresholds”, at the stories of freedom of women (but not only for women), had also returned in the recent Morgana. Stories of girls your mother wouldn’t approve of (with Chiara Tagliaferri, Mondadori, 2019) in which Michela Murgia had given a voice to ten women outside the box, Moana Pozzi as Marina Abramovic or Vivienne Westwood. Plus another voice, hers, that literature will miss.
August 10, 2023 (change August 10, 2023 | 23:24)
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