In the foreground in «Eppure noi due», Giulia Marziali’s debut novel, there is the attempted suicide of a young Roman researcher at Harvard, but what this beautiful young and clean story tells with clear prose is love, fragile and resistant at the same time, but which conquers all, if it is like this.
Giulia Marziali is a young Roman scholar (born in 1994) who gives her experience at Harvard as a researcher in comparative literature to Filippo and Amelia, the two luminous protagonists who have invested the most important part of themselves in the study. Both Roman and trained in classical studies, archaeologists, he a scholar of the Mayan civilization, she of the Hittite civilization, both immersed on the one hand in the exhilarating multicultural atmosphere of Boston where they live, on the other in the shallows of academic dynamics, but each with his own experience: peaceful with a loving and wealthy family (owners of a well-known grocery store in the Monti district of Rome) for Filippo, who however has experienced the condition of depression since he was a boy (an important theme of the novel treated with delicacy by the author), with a torn ego despite the “everything” one possesses. Filippo, who accepts the treatment, does not know how to “rationally pigeonhole his depression into linear temporal tracks, which is as difficult as finding the exact date of the end of an ancient empire”, but the black hole that risks sucking him in is removed by two epiphanies: the first is the discovery in the Widener Library, between the pages of a book, of an ultrasound (which actually happened to Marziali) with the image of a fetus behind which is the writing “in the mountains without end”, which to Filippo, a scholar of “sacred mountains”, seems like a sign of opening up a place of salvation.
The other is the meeting, at Harvard, with Amelia, who appears to him “beautiful, like an Assyrian statue”, Amelia with her young freshness even though she has to fight with the ghosts of the past and the painful reality of a broken family. But knowing Greek and Latin is not enough to say the words of mutual care to each other, so in a continuous movement of lights and shadows, as they move forward between logograms and glyphs, the two young people laboriously walk the path of love. But how much strength and resistance books and study give us, and how precious the presence of friends and loved ones is to give new meaning to life!
