A story of suicide and survival, “a Friday in April” (Einaudi), a melancholy Memoir but that opens up to the hope, of the American writer Donald Antrim, a “chronicle from within”, enhanced by the beautiful translation of Cristiana Mennella.
It all begins on a Friday in April 2006 when Antrim rises on the roof of his condominium in Brooklyn where between railing, frame and fire scale experiences a will of suicide, not because he miss the desire to live, but rather because he wants to surrender to the disease. Because this is the story of a disease that Antrim prefers to call “suicide”, not depression, because “depression is a cavity, a downhill bent and a rise”. And suicide, on the other hand, is a “natural process, a morbid course, rather than a gesture or a choice, a decision or a desire”.
The author sees suicide as a long illness, which originates in trauma and isolation, violence and abandonment, a evil of body and mind, the first an organ, the second a mystery. From here begins a profound reflection on a theme that has always been a collective taboo, on which the author insists between family memories (a childhood passed between removals and crises between alcoholic parents, solitude, insomnia and abysmal silences) and chronicle of hospitalizations in hospital, various therapies including electroconvulsant one, drugs and physiological reactions. Antrim retraces healings and repercussions with lucid analysis on all the symptoms and effects of “illness”: a sort of paralysis of the body and mind, the choked voice, the short breath, the feeling of giving in the inside, isolation even when there are friends and family members outside, because there is always the idea that by taking away their lives, the life of the loved ones who remain are better, although they will remain forever guilt.
Meanwhile, death is hatched, while the news arrives that a friend, great writer like David Foster Wallace, who had encouraged Antrim to make electroconvulsive therapy, took his own life. Then, however, there are the saving figures, doctors and doctors and women who help not to ruminate the idea of death: like Marija, to whom the novel is dedicated, a pianist who became his wife of Antrim. And so the memory of that Friday in April, “those months and years, that eternity” become a story.
