Can two wounded lives heal, at least a little, together? Are there networks of small-huge solidarity, of gestures of care, of unpredictable and salvific transversal affections? Can we find them, above all can we see them? The beautiful answers these questions, with the delicate and painful touch of literature Rita Ragonese’s debut novel, «Life Against»published by Fazi.
The wounded lives are those, very different, of the young Angela and the old Umberto.
She has just been released from prison, separated from her child Martin, chased away from a family over which her despotic father, a very strict deacon with a heart of stone, victim of an idea of punitive religion, reigns despotically, and in fact abandoned by her partner’s family -boy, another empire of machismo, where exploitation and malfeasance are practiced; he was guilty, many years earlier, of a fault that separated him from his beloved family, and from the rest of the world.
They live on the margins, Angela with the tumultuous energy of a mortified youth, desperately fighting to get back to the surface, reluctantly accepting the help, and control, of social services; Umberto locked inside a solitude built with painful obstinacy and mixed with alcohol.
The setting is a surprising Venice seen from the other side: not lace on the water but crusts of cement resting on the grey; not the domes but the chimneys. And the little lives that tourists will never know about (but so do they, poor people, «despite their efforts they will never touch the soul of Venice»…). A beloved city, walked in its humid shadow with a loving gaze: the author is the daughter of Sicilians, who life has taken very farand now lives in Veneto, and has decided to choose the most daring place for the story he tells us, in an elsewhere far from the international splendor of Venice. But elsewhere is the place by definition of Angela (“It all seems like prison to her now: all places, hers, united by something depriving”), of Umberto (“His place is outside. From the world, from the things of life”).
Elsewhere is also the arduous, lateral place in which Ragonese builds his voicemaking gestures speak, giving life to the thoughts of his characters, and of the small worlds that surround them – the community house, the supermarket where Angela and Umberto find themselves working together, the suburban trattoria – without ever overlapping, with a authentic gift for the very acute vision of details, and for a few metaphors of great strength on the page, which fully give us that experience of absence and that “gramigna that is part of coexistence”, that search for life that ends up infecting even those who seem to have given up on life.
Beautiful, among others, the character of Bressanello, a priest teacher, whimsical and bizarre, the perfect counterpart to Angela’s Pater: his religion is welcome, warmth, an invitation to “be there, in things”. But there are many characters in which that spark of humanity shines, capable of networking and saving: Grace, Angela’s roommate; Franco, Umberto’s butcher colleague; the extraordinary hosts, Oreste and Giusi, who literally feed Umberto, with trays of hot dishes every evening and with a human presence that for a long time remains his only, last anchor, and who will then also welcome Angela.
But there are other stories of redemption, of faith in the human, of beauty, without it being a consolatory novel, if anything a novel that on every page, with a sharp style but full of pietas, reminds us of the pain and stalemate of certain lives, that inevitable “weed”, and the torment that can be inside that device we call family.
Life can be against you, often it is, and then it’s up to us. Telling it is also part of the struggle.
Rita Ragonese will meet readers in “her” Sicily: tomorrow in Messina, at the Feltrinelli bookshop (6pm), and on 3 December in Palermo, at the Feltrinelli bookshop (6pm), with Claudia Lanteri.