THE REVIEW
twelve o’clock, October 12, 2021 – 20:13
The new novel is a reflection on death and childhood
from Mirella Armiero
DDomenico Starnone raises the stakes and puts at the center of his new novel the theme of the themes, death, the great repressed of the Western world. Naturally he does it with his light step, with the irony that has distinguished him for years, without weighing down or emphasizing his style full of colloquiality and memories, in short, like a true writer. Beyond any possible humorous declination, it remains for the fact that the reflection revolves all around the ineluctable sense of our finiteness and that passage of the infantile age in which we painfully realize this condition.
Mortal and immortal story of the little girl from Milan (out today for Einaudi) almost an apologue: the story, set in a familiar setting that does not differ from that of many other Starnone novels, focuses on the stylized figure of a seductive little girl because she is different, distant from her companions. her refined Italian and the doll-like movements of the carillon, so much so that she is considered Milanese and not Neapolitan. Object of passionate love by the narrator, Mim, who moves between naive scholastic-literary-comic discoveries, childish boastfulness and a training in the courtyard, between fights and explorations of forbidden places. Like the grave of the dead, basically a manhole closed by a marble slab, which the boy would be ready to cross to get his beloved back, in the unfortunate case that he should cross. A new Orpheus in search of Eurydice, sure not to fall into the error of turning around to look at his beloved and therefore losing her.
Mim lives with her jealous father and her beautiful mother who, just sketched out, seem to refer directly to the universe of Via Gemito. To dominate this time for the ineffable character of the grandmother, a semi-wild creature adoring towards the grandson. Somehow it looks like a positive reverse of the unforgettable grandmother outlined by Antonio Franchini The abusive, twenty years ago. If we add that even in the last novel by the young Alessio Forgione the grandmother stands out, it seems evident that this figure still has its strength intact in the southern family dynamics.
For Mim di Starnone an inexhaustible resource that asks for nothing and can receive nothing from grandchildren and son-in-law, even though she is always ready to provide care and services. At one point Mim, who has become a university student, involves her in a linguistic research on the dialect and unleashes the unexpressed forces of the meek little woman. For once, the grandmother finally feels her supremacy in a field she practiced with ancient wisdom. From an early age, the nephew heard himself calling: Add vai, franfellk? Abbsce. Abbasciadd? C below. Tuornambrss. Now under the aura of authority that envelops the supernal world of the university, the grandmother feels legitimized in the most brazen expression of her language, in which she has placed her own identity, her memories, her life.
Also through the grandmother, in the period of Mim’s childhood, the boy became aware of what it means to grow old. What happened to Mim, wonders, that beautiful girl from the photograph from so many years ago, and who this awkward and embarrassing woman who took her place? And again the grandmother to accompany the grandson towards the direct knowledge of the last passage: she is the first person Mim sees dead. Her nephew, as a child, had snatched a promise from her: that of going back to the world of the dead to reveal the mystery to her. A rash promise, undoubtedly, but the grandmother was still the one always ready, always available and loving, who had watched over Mim’s growth, hiding from him the details of a dark affair, that of the little girl from Milan who tragically died. Of course, returning from the world of the dead seems an impossible undertaking even for this generous grandmother, but she is certainly Mim’s intermediary for entering adult life, with its load of pain and awareness but also pregnant with the possibilities that every existence contains in itself. .
12 October 2021 | 20:13
© Time.News