Fate often shuffles the cards and is pleased with it despite the “stupid attempt to change it”. Mina knows this well – a diminutive that comes from her grandmother Giacoma, and not “like the singer” – protagonist and narrator of “Mina like the singer” (Apalós), the beautiful novel, set in Messina, by Giusi Arimatea from Messina, journalist, playwright and theater critic.
A sixty-five-year-old Mina sees the snapshots of her life in front of the immense blue expanse of the sea, when there is no longer a trace of restlessness in her heart. And it does so by going back over the years, reconstructing the history of a family in which “everyone is irreparably broken, each in their own way”, with a backdrop of Messina that seems to breathe with the same tremors as the characters and maintain that sense of estrangement that sets the pace of the story.
It’s the Sixties and a little Mina with her flounced and flowered sundress feels happy among her colorful paper castles, as if everything was normal in her once happy family but then broken by the pain of a little brother who died very young. Mina has learned to cultivate unhappiness since she was a child, between a housewife mother prisoner of desperation, of guilt, of the emptiness into which she sank, and a watchmaker father who does his best to sweeten his little girl’s life. Yet, despite the silences and shortcomings, Mina’s life in the building where she lives in via Acqua del Conte, behind via Tommaso Cannizzaro, flows almost lightly between games in the courtyard, school and frequenting Costanza, her best friend in whose home, in the same building, Mina rediscovers the sense of family and care.
Until adolescence, on which “carousel” Mina gets on and forgets everything, the instinct is to live, “only to then let herself be overwhelmed by the fear of losing control over reality and pulling back”, while all of Italy between the Seventies and Eighties experiences great chaos, the same one perceived by Mina inside and outside of herself. And if after high school the opaque present takes its toll every day, however the conquest of a job as a secretary thanks to the affectionate interest of Costanza’s family seems to open glimmers of normality for the young Mina, determined to overcome the temptation of invisibility with new experiences and encounters. Love also appears in her life, or what seems like love, but which instead makes her hand herself over once again to fate, letting it choose for her, and to the deceptions and adversities that follow.
Thus, between anger and guilt, Mina once again allows herself to be crushed by reality, increasingly refining the art of losing, which becomes a devastating sense of impotence when the castle of illusions finally collapses and the city itself, with its superficial respectability, seems to be angry with her. Then, the rest of Mina’s life is a leap into the dark of which the sustained and participatory narrative breath of the novel maintains the tension, until the final resolution, equally painful but profound which concludes one part of her life and opens another.
