literature
twelve o’clock, April 27, 2021 – 13:04
The condition of “expatriates” unites those who stay and those who leave, like Francesco and Claudia, united by an intimate bond but never fully a “couple”
of Enzo Mansueto
IDesiati’s new book ends with a series of notes that only the editorial convention relegates to the marginality of an appendix. The title reveals it: “Notes from the writing desk or spirit room”. In fact, of various kinds, they evoke the ghosts of the writer (or of the narrator?), To whom the book has given voice, in a fictional and confessional writing, with the frown of generational reckoning. The definition of the lemma of the title is relevant: «Spatriato is the past participle of the verb spatriare, which is about to go away or, as Treccani says, to drive out of the homeland. In some southern dialects, including Martinese, it has other nuances, such as uncertain, disoriented, wandering, stunned, without art or part, in some cases even an orphan: homeland derives from Latin and means land of the fathers, therefore the spatriate can also be who has remained without a father, or who has never had him ».
The autobiographical and generational trait
Mario Desiati’s novel, «Expatriates»(Einaudi, Turin 2021, pp. 288, euro 20) is, in fact, above all the unpacified, lyrical and realistic portrait of today’s forty-year-olds from the southern Italian province, which amply includes the author’s biography. But Desiati, unlike other contemporaries, even in the story in the first person, shuns the ways of autofiction and narrative hybridizations, to insist, not without risks, on a peculiar and coherent traditional novel format, which also has the audacity to compete with maximalist themes – love, family, homeland, youth gone – and to pluck the strings of sentimentality and lyricism. If in the last tests this challenge had produced mixed results, from the eager impulses of “The book of forbidden love” (2013) to the rough voyeurism of «Candor»(2016), here Desiati seems to find a measure, intoning those same themes on which he has been beating from the beginning: precariousness, class photos, provincial life, thwarted loves. The key to this measure is the ellipsis, the unspoken: intended both as a time jump – the story of a long period of time, from adolescence to forty years, summarized in six agile chapters with an epilogue – and as silent omission, of details, of memories, of stories, of bodies, which in the end, with its phantasmatic silence, will turn out to be substantial.
The return of Francesco Veleno
The plot can be reduced to the story of a couple of young people who over the years will never really make a couple: not at least in the orthodox sense that families, places of origin, narrow mentality would impose. It starts from Martina Franca, at the time of high school: he, Francesco Veleno (the name comes back as a mask from previous books), a boy different from the others, engaged in the rites of a dogmatic and dramatized Catholicism, dark as black grapes, at first sight falls in love with her, Claudia, bold, transgressive, from a respectable family, beautiful with her red hair. An unlikely love, between liquid sexualities, despite the palpable attraction. It will be the respective family histories, between coincidences, adulteries, rumors, to procure the occasion of the strange relationship, which will change over the years, due to an intimate, distant, nameless bond. The stories of the two are grafted onto the petty bourgeois family drama, a reason that is a prelude to estrangement, and finally embody, with bitterness, two social types of our parts: those who remain uncomfortable at home, Francesco, and those who leave, Claudia due to a growing disregard of its territory and its vaunted values (the myth of the Apulian spring). So here is London, Milan and especially Berlin, and many extreme experiences, acting as a European lens, to finally observe with disenchantment, without folkloricism, but also without very provincial xenophilia, the land of origin, Puglia, Bari, Taranto, Martina Franca, the roots, with the eyes of a generation betrayed and spatriated and in the shadow of an increasingly outdated meridian thought. A novel that nails dreams on the page and moves, thanks also to the voices of our poets.
April 27, 2021 | 13:04
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