“Books are a kind of map, but it is that we must be good at making us bring where we want, even in dark, dangerous places”. This is what books do books while they leave deep signs about our flesh, our thoughts. And this map that brings us where we have to, where we want, found residence in “With the dark I see it” (Einaudi Supercoralli), the beautiful debut novel by the journalist of the Gazzetta del Sud and blogger Anna Mallamo (who in 2010 with “Tango lessons”, Città del Sole editions, breathed and dispensed the medicine of Tango, his great passion), when the words found their way and “the expectations that live there, everything we are called to take”, as the author “Strettese” writes (born in Reggio Calabria, lives in Messina in perennial wingers in the banks), have become a real emotional feat with an evocative writing. with a rich and resonant dough, visionary and oracular.
A cultured “Italian with dialectal and mallamo’s” Italian and so that it was “full -bodied, proliferating, turgid” and crosses “worlds in transition” between old and new, between ancient and modern, between the language of emancipation and the language of belonging, of the underwear. “A completely new language that affirms and denies, alarm and consoles “writes Donatella di Pietrantonio in the Book band (which will be presented tomorrow at 5 pm in Reggio, in the mayors of the mayors of Palazzo San Giorgio, as part of the festival wallanding in storm).
Shy and restless, a body now cage and now bounds to overcome and a face still full of questions, Lucia Carbone, I narrating the novelhe is a sixteen -year -old high school student who in Reggio Calabria, in the 80s, was going through together with his friend Beatrice, who “does not understand it but knows it”, the restlessness and invisibility of their imperfect and immense age (they know and practice “the chemistry of the composition”), the absolute and yet full of cracks in which you believe you are the wrong one, except to think that they are the others, Family, “at the center of everything, which brings the weight of all, a system of full and empty, of appearances and shortcomings, all together”.
Life is concentrated there Di Lucia, innocent and hungry for life in that family “which is a war where alliances change continuously”, in a city crossed by fury and violence, with its mafia wars and the kidnappings and political clashes. And “in that year of grace 1981 in which being young is a shared dream, it has been spent and dazed and torn and insured”, Lucia, of a small-bourgeois family, who thanks to the classic culture of Aeschylus has learned what betrayal and revenge are, he feels within himself the Averse and the city and knows how to be like their violent and fragile, lives the fact of ” And the maps all wrong ».
A burning heart that one day of a “crazy March” decides, attracting him with a book, of segregating Rosario, a classmate, son of a boss of the ‘Ndrangheta, in the cellar of the old grandmother’s house, Lucia like her, died the year before. A explosive gesture, with whom Lucia thinks of diverting Beatrice from her anxiety in love for that boy from a family “of Malicristians”, and to discover the mystery of the death of his favorite aunt, pink, lover of nature, books and signs, which took place in Aspromonte in circumstances never clarified.
Thus begins a quête which – explains the author – “crosses the city with a loving look, but without concealing any shadow”: a painting with black and white etching with red lash (red as the blood that colors the novel not because you are poured, but because it is what flows between those who love you and those who hate, between the above and the below a land that insists on the abyss and on the indispensable beauty of the strait), a color never quiet between the overflowing Meridian light and the sparkling darkness of that sea of fare and Sirene-Custodi, in front of which happiness is like pain, annihilated and at the same time consoles.
Present to everything, also “fimmina”, there is the body of Reggio Calabriacity of climbs and descents, “Greek city in meanders”, complex and stratified since birth, “full of eyes to which nothing escapes and that everything is escaped”, many Reggio that sink one within the other, with their ghosts, even those to whom we wanted, and their monsters, even those born from a misunderstood sense of love and the “blood chains”. mothers repeat themselves in their daughters.
Each investigation requires the darkness to interrogate the puzzles and Lucia, attracted by the underground movements, including those of love, but determined to undo the world to build it as it is precisely of the young age, wants to see with its eyes, as invited its name (the novel is full of speaking names), Until the discovery that no one is innocentthat the past can also return poisonous herbs, together with the medicinal ones that the pink aunt loved to collect on the mountain.
Even the affections have something intoxicating, Lucia is learning it, and her descending and tracing in the and grandmother’s cellar, a pulsating house, trap and refuge like every house, a house that recalls with her silence, also talking, is a necessary catabase to know and get to know each other.
The hope then, that in the Pandora vase lies together with the evils of the world (Lucia asks for the reason to her wise professor Castelli), It remains in the ability to see the real without closing your eyes, in the momentum of change that illuminates the darkness with which you however have to deal with it, the same that helps to go down the depths of each of us.