Naples in the thirties
twelve o’clock, December 3, 2021 – 6:06 pm
Re-published the debut novel by Giovanna Mozzillo which tells the story of its genesis
from Giovanna Mozzillo
Ffinally! Finally, and it still does not seem true to me, it returns to the bookstore (from 4 December for Marlin, ed) The Miss and Love, the first novel I wrote. Just think, it saw the light twenty years ago, in November 2001. And then I don’t even try to pretend I’m not excited: nobody would believe me anyway. Better to confess it plainly: for me this republication is an event: an expected and desired event!
Why? Oh, for various reasons. The first? The first is that the characters are like children and, precisely as children, the writer wants them to survive as long as possible. But, to survive, of course, the characters need the attention and emotion of the reader. The second? The second is that the novel tells the story of a great love: a forbidden, clandestine, troubled love, but at the same time very sweet, satisfying, intoxicating: in short, indispensable. And it tells how on the wave of this love the protagonist finds the courage not to submit to the conventions of the time, and from the lived experience she is enriched and helped to grow, transforming herself from a naive and insecure girl into a woman fully aware of her own identity, in therefore a woman who, in the current, passionate debate on the condition of women, I believe has the credentials to be cited as a forerunner.
The third reason that the story is the background of the Naples of the Thirties, still intact in its infinite beauty: a Naples in which a green mantle of gardens, orchards and woods dressed the hills for celebration. A Naples where the streams had not stopped flowing towards the sea. A Naples in which Posillipo, as La Capria wrote, was our Polynesia and in the silent darkness of the nights serenades echoed and fireflies shone.
Another reason that basically the novel is how we were. In the sense that he describes both the people of Naples at the time, a people immersed in its resigned misery and faithful to its ancient rites, and the bourgeoisie: an arrogant, discriminatory bourgeoisie, entrenched in its privileges, which, however, almost compact and without hesitation, he indulged in the sentimentality of Tito Schipa’s songs and white telephone films. And, I venture to underline, it is a question of how we were that wants to respond to two needs. Because on the one hand it fills at least in part that lack of bourgeois fiction which has always characterized Neapolitan literature and rich plebeian fiction. On the other hand, it highlights how our society (but a discourse that applies to all Italians) has long and not unwillingly been subjected to the brainwashing carried out by fascism, ending up becoming an accomplice in the unfortunate decisions of power, and how only in the face of catastrophe has gained the awareness necessary to react. I believe that remembering it is essential in this bleak beginning of the millennium in which our democracy (and not only ours) appears so uncertain of its values and so hesitant in affirming and defending them.
And here is the last reason that perhaps the most important of all: my protagonist, although she happens to impact pain and death, is still convinced that life is a portent, an ineffable portent to be lived with enthusiasm, adhering to it fully. and thanking those who gave it to us. And, she is convinced of it, because I am convinced of it too.
In short, mine is an optimistic book. And optimism is a commodity that I believe is always needed. But I still want to add: you see, I am grateful to this book, because, being my first novel, writing it, I fully realized how much, and how rewarding, the potential of writing is: because writing is like a time machine she knows how to recover the past, she knows how to restore the original aspect to places trivialized by the passing of the years, she knows how to hoard the shreds of memory (that memory of which we women have always been devoted guardians) and she knows how to resurrect missing persons, allowing us to reconnect with them the dialogue that death had brutally interrupted.
December 3, 2021 | 18:06
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