It is a ruthless etching of a possible apocalypse «Calùra» (Rubbettino), debut novel by Saverio Gangemi, from Melicucco in Calabria, which received the Special Jury Mention at the 37th Calvino Prize and was proposed by Massimo Onofri for the Strega Prize.
One afternoon in June an anomalous “heat” suddenly descends, a hot and still air that spreads a sticky and yellowish patina between sky and earth. And the breath of nature, until then benevolent, despite the plague that has just passed, becomes red-hot for the family group placed under the lens of the writer. It is a remnant of humanity caught in an undefined era (perhaps around the 15th century, as some historical-linguistic spies seem to believe) in an unnamed place but which from a few dialect terms we can guess is Calabria.
Everything, however, is unrecognizable to indicate the insignificance of man’s presence on the planet. Even time, individual and collective, seems motionless, because compared to cosmic time, that of human presence on earth is a moment, flattened on existences that from time to time have moved between dazzling discoveries and devastating falls. And when the «piria», the «calùra» envelops everything in its «arsurated» grip, the first to give in is nature: the ivy, the jasmine, the fig give up, the Saracen olive trees, the tomatoes, the oregano, the roses enter into agony, the animals succumb, among which the simple and united life of a family took place, with the grandfather Lanczo, the mother Filomena, the children Lanczo, Nina, Rachela and little Doriano, Teresa’s promised friend Duardo taken away, like others, by the scythe of the plague. Lives now narcotized by the constraint of survival, since the “heat” took away meaning from the days.
Only one tree resists, born from a withered rod and grown magically, or evilly, in an abnormal way, whose lush foliage ensures the family group a bit of shade and around which infinite firefly eyes (the dead?) move, scrutinizing the ghostly shadows of the living. But in an alien geography, strongly symbolic of the void of nothingness, the breath of death breathes on everything, while the hours of waiting drag on and even the words crumble, the body withers from starvation, no longer master of its own thoughts, because it is in the flesh that physical disorder and the loss of the beauty of nature are imprinted. Which nevertheless seems to resist, in a cycle of rebirth indifferent to the presence of man on earth.