The ghosts never move away from the narrative, and therefore intimate world of the Messina writer Nadia Terranova. They come with the breeze of memory, from a time of before, from the most recent past or further away, even three generations away as in his new novel, just released for Guanda, “What I know of you”an intense story that still gives you to the ghosts, its own, family and collective ones. And if it is always the siren of memory that recalls the writing of the Terranova – with “Farewell Ghosts” (2018), which came to the Cinquina Finalista of the 2019 Strega Prize, and before that, with the debut novel, “The years on the contrary” (2016), but also with “Trema la night” (2022, all published by Einaudi) -, is in the female homeland of the family and her homeland, also a mother and land of sirens, which the writer searches and Find the enchants of his narrative figure.
After all, as we read in a chapter of the book, «Writing is to create a spell, a certainty that comes from the fact of being born on an island. Writing, however, is also a prophecy, transforming a dream or a vision of the future into memory ». To do this, however, it is necessary to break down the rubber wall of the “family mythology”, break its deceptions, painfully cross lies and errors (what often holds the family constraints), discover themselves imperfect starting from those who preceded us.
There is in writing, there is a strange power in the memory: they make the dead with the living, the dream with reality, the images of the past with those of the present are together. Thus, in this story there is a mother, the writer, who, as soon as he gave birth, protrudes on the cradle of his little girl and “looks down in the crater” and at that moment, “in the isolation of the hospital” understands that “not” He may ever afford to go crazy “(there is” in motherhood a strange power “, so Virginia Woolf, reported in exergue).
Yes, why In the matrilinear branch of the history of the family of the writer madness it is not an abstract name, but corresponds to a body and a woman’s name: Venera, the maternal great -grandmotherwhich was almost a hundred years earlier, it was interned for eleven days in the health villa of the Mandular Institute, the Missina asylum. The word “asylum”, the terranova writes, is for her “an invention within the writing, it is here that she discovers it”, because family mythology has never pronounced it, preferring the surname of Dr. Lorenzo Mandalari euphemistically as a synonym of the ‘Psychiatric hospital for alienated he founded at the end of the nineteenth century, and as a metonymy of anyone who has “triggered”, “narrow”, that is, manifest signs of hysteria and nevrastenia (female deviance was more known and frequent above all under the fascist regime …).
Memory, such as Scripture, for the Terranova – whose latest novel is to bother the dead, and so venerated, in spite of the reticence of family mythology, is going on on the threshold of a dream, preceded by a half word on her left falling by chance from the mother when the writer was a child. From that moment Venera seems to have wandered like a spectrum in the unconscious of the Terranova, but was after the birth of his daughter who decided to question the stories of the women of his family.
However, “It is one thing to dream of the past, an account go and get it”.
Thus, the writer decides to “go and take it”, to investigate and, together, to give birth to this novel-quête which, as in a guided dream, now tangled now feverish, retraces, with the help of archival documents, Dark underground layers of family archeology-market. Who was venerated, married to a former grenadier then trader? What mother was it? And his two girls? And the third, perhaps never born before it was interned? What was the event that led her to cross the Mandular threshold? And the fathers, the men of this family who starts? (because this is also a story of fathers).
Venera seems to be herself to demand that she rewrites her historyto bring out what can be accepted as truth, therefore it becomes twice the great -grandpose, a lively ghost. And when the writer discovers her medical record (reported in the novel) in what was once Mandalari, Nadia and Venera are in front of the other, look at each other in the eyes (and oblique and sad eyes, beautiful, are those of the The photographic image of Isa Marcelli on the cover), they “exchange” guilt and fears, share silences and anxieties, inadequateness and tiredness. A way to reread her history as mother, daughter and wife, and, therefore, to look to the future.