«The Library of Missing Physicists» (Garzanti), novel by Barbara Bellomoa writer and teacher from Catania, a historian by training, as well as the author of many successful novels including the series of the Sicilian archaeologist Isabella De Clio, who investigates the mysteries of antiquity, is born from the idea of finding Ettore Majoranathe great genius of physics who mysteriously disappeared in 1938. «The authorship of a fundamental text such as “The Disappearance of Majorana” by Sciascia is essential, but I couldn’t get the novel off the ground – says Bellomo in our conversation – but while I was consulting the documentation relating to Majorana and Panisperna StreetI was struck by one of the photographs published in Erasmo Recami’s volume on the Majorana case, with the image of the library. It was then that I imagined Ida, therefore a woman, in an all-male world, I “saw” her right there. A librarian who loved literature like me and above all who was not an expert in physics, because the other big problem was bringing such difficult topics as quantum physics to readers who, like me, are not familiar with the subject. And then Ida stole my pen, took up the space she wanted, grew up, and introduced me to her story».
The 1930s, between Catania and Rome, Ida Clementi, a fictional character, a hidden narrative voice, because it is always her point of view that prevails in the third-person narration, is a girl from a bourgeois family with a patriarchal imprint, destined for a marginal life, while she is instead eager to work. She manages to wrest from her father the opportunity to work as a librarian in via Panisperna, a temple of Italian science, where she comes into contact with the greatest scientists of the time, Fermi, Majorana, Amaldi, Corbino, Segrè, Pontecorvo, and finally breathes culture together with freedom, despite the regime. Thus she finds herself becoming friends with Ettore, reserved and “strange” but who opens up to her about their shared passion for literature. And thanks to Ettore she meets Alberto, a fictional character, with whom a great love begins. Then Ettore disappears, the monster of war looms ever more threatening and life changes for everyone. Ida and Alberto never see each other again and the post-war period sees her leaving her job and marrying a good head doctor, a “good match” proposed by her father, serene but not happy. By now it is the 1950s, but Ida, due to a situation that ends up undermining her marriage, often returns in her memory to those 1930s, difficult but nevertheless full of dreams and hopes. Therefore she begins a real journey, both intimate, in search of herself, and geographical, absurdly looking for Ettore, but in reality looking for Alberto and the self of that time.
«The Library of Missing Physicists» will be presented at the Bonanzinga bookshop in Messina at 6.30 pm on 5 September (and in Rome on 10 September in a bookshop in via Panisperna).
So, finding Majorana was the first idea for this novel. How did you walk through this story?
“I have always thought about Majorana, and I know that there is a lot about his disappearance, and much more could be written, but my desire was to bring this genius back to life on the page. Which is not easy, not only because you have to deal with his disappearance, but also because bringing someone who really had his story back to life is like entering his life. And so, here is the idea of placing fictional characters next to Majorana that would give me the freedom to reconstruct the moment without touching the life of someone who really existed”.
Ida is a character who represents the difficult female condition, but also an example of personal redemption…
«The more I wrote about her, the more I found myself in the shoes of a woman of the 1930s. Under the regime, women were forbidden to teach humanities in high schools; women had to be “angels of the hearth”. And even after the war, despite having won the vote, separation was not allowed; abandoning the marital home was a crime. Ida has had a free spirit since she was a young girl; during the war she drove trucks to help the wounded, and she did volunteer work, but at a certain point she succumbed to being considered marginal because she was a woman. She too somehow disappears, because life forces it on her. But then when the world collapses on her, she explodes, and desperation manages to free her from everything that was a bit tight or that she was enduring».
Via Panisperna is a street that remains in the imagination. Have you ever passed by and imagined?
“I have passed by via Panisperna several times and as a historian I have felt disappointed because these physicists are remembered with a very small plaque. So I thought that they too, the “boys of via Panisperna” who changed history, have “disappeared”. The title of the novel is not accidental. We have schools named after Fermi, Majorana, but many others, I think of a Rasetti, a Pontecorvo, a Segrè, have fallen a bit into the shadows”.
Returning to the marginal condition of women, we come to family stories.
“It is inevitable that I have come up against a difficult reality, unimaginable today. Although there is still much to do for women, much has been done, we must not forget it. In my book the family is very important, families have their faults, the condition of women was determined not only by fathers, but also by mothers who accepted as “normal” things that were not normal. In fact, Ida’s mother always repeats “you just have to come to terms with it” “.
Even Giulia, a fictional character, who in the novel is one of the physicists who frequents via Panisperna, in the end is only the wife.
«For the overshadowed women scientists, I took inspiration from Gabriella Greison’s book on women in science, who had to enter the university not through the main entrance because it was not allowed, or who do research because there was a man, a husband, next to them. Fermi’s wife, Laura Capon, activist, writer, scientist, became a wife, a choice that was normal for the women of that time. Not to mention Ida Noddack, who had hypothesized nuclear fission before Fermi, but she was a woman…».
It is not easy to engage with characters who existed, and among these also with Sciascia, whom you have turned into a character, well outlined in his posture, gestures, words, pauses.
“I have read Sciascia in its entirety, I reread it, and as a teacher I recommend it to my students. Just as I did not want to steal from Ettore’s life, here too I wanted Sciascia’s ideas and reconstructions to be his own, and so, precisely to leave him the paternity, I thought it was a good idea to put him in the novel as a character. Out of respect for an enormous author.”
Find out more in the digital edition
To read the whole thing, buy the newspaper or download the digital version.