Giusy Staropoli Calafati celebrates Italy and Corrado Alvaro in his new novel
After the success of Santissima Earth (Laruffa Editore), with which he was proposed to the Strega 2022 award by Corrado Calabrò, The writer Giusy Staropoli Calafati returns to the bookstore with Alvaro. More than one life (Castelvecchi Editore), an intense and vibrant work that pays homage to Italy and the memory of Corrado Alvaro130 years after his birth.
In the novel, long -awaited, which brings Professor Aldo Maria Morace’s prestigious preface – Alvaro’s top expert in Italy – The life of the writer, Strega Prize in 1951, turns into a historical, literary and political journey. Childhood is told in Calabria, the passage to Rome and the path marked by experiences to the front, from the persecutions of the fascist regime to travel to Europe, to the beating heart of an Italy in transformation.
“More than one life is not a simple biographical novel on Corrado Alvaro. It is more – explains Giusy Staropoli Calafati. – He does not start from Calabria. He starts in Rome, in Vicolo del Bottino, in a house in Piazza di Spagna, with his gaze on the staircase of the Trinity. It crosses almost all of Italy, arrives in Europe and then returns. He goes to the front, faces the regime. He enters the living room of Margherita Sarfatti, in the pirandello vill. Until the house of Maria and Goffredo Bellonci. Corrado Alvaro …
The novel, full of unpublished anecdotes and personal details, offers an intimate look at the life of the writer, going beyond the usual essays with which Alvaro has always spoken. The work not only celebrates Alvaro, but hopes can be studied at school among the authors of the 1900s, so that its literary inheritance can finally be recognized and appreciated.
In his preface, Professor Aldo Maria Morace writes: (…) It is a wonderfully human alvaro, the one that arises from the breath of his narrative, never mortified and circumscribed in documentarity: an alvaro that vibrates with ignitions and hardness, of family dramas and incredible resiliences to individual and historical evil (Italy is a country () that) will never become a man, who will never become a man, who will never become a man. never responsible ‘). He is an Alvaro who imposes himself on the memory of the reader in the daily dimension, painfully lived, of his biography, but that the writer manages to revive with a revealing truth starting from the exodus from San Luca, when he was not yet decominated, until he came to the full realization of the childhood dream, and then adolescence, insufficient to him by his father. They are quick chapters, marked by the dates of ‘almost a life’: documentaryly flawless (not surprisingly it is very told through letters, real or invented), yet happily pervaded by an illuminating force that only a narrative writing can affect the reader. There is a non -fiction truth, which is that of the historians of literature; And there is a truest truth, that only narrative writing comes to steal to the secret of a man, revealing it. It is the result to which Giusy Staropoli has received; And I can only envy it healthy. (…)
So far on Alvaro they have been written above all wise; For the first time, however, its story becomes a novel, made with involvement and sense of responsibility by a writer who has always made Calabria her flag. Who knows that he cannot turn into a film for cinema!
The book will be released in the bookstore on March 14, while the first national presentation is announced for April 15 at the Citadel of the Calabria Region, on the occasion of the 130th anniversary of the birth of Corrado Alvaro. With this event, the celebrations will officially begin to remember and rediscover one of the most significant authors of the Italian twentieth century.