The writer Cinzia Leone returns to the shelves with a painful, powerful and very topical novel. “You come day in the night” immediately reveals itself as a book capable of dealing with burning issues such as war, the loss of a child and the admission that everyone hides behind numerous masks, a ploy necessary to protect one’s existential wounds.
The scene opens with Arièl Anav, an Italian soldier who has chosen to leave his country. They call them lonely soldiers precisely because they have decided to start over from scratch. The boy makes Israel his new homeland, embracing its cause and, despite the renunciations and misunderstandings that have distanced him from his family, Arièl goes straight on his path, following his own ideals of justice. Until, one bad day, a kamikaze blows himself up in a club in Neve Tzedek and only Arièl Anav’s sense of duty, able to grasp the danger signals, sounding the alarm and hurling his body against the terrorist (becoming a shield made of flesh and generosity), prevents a massacre of innocents from taking place. Arièl, a generous boy with red hair and light eyes, dies tragically, and from here begins the true narration of “You come day in the night”, weaving a series of plots and destinies that intertwine, opening wounds and upsetting the so-called normality.
Leone, journalist and writer, refers right from the title to Romeo and Juliet and introduces the journey that Micòl and Daniel – the divorced and separated parents of the soldier – will have to make to follow the investigations and the funeral of their son, shocked by anger and trauma, reacting very differently to fate and coming to terms with a great truth: there is no word to define the condition of those who are orphaned of a child. That painful and unnatural term, the author recalls, simply doesn’t exist. A theme on which David Grossman has already painfully reflected with his prose, a test that Leone faces and overcomes with an intimate cut that never borders on morbidity.
Arièl hovers over the pages, with his mysteries, his homosexual love and the choice to drop everything and start over from Israel, following his grandmother and his rocky character. Arièl dictates the line of this modern and, at the same time, timeless tragedy and each character will try to bridge the distance between memories and reality, finding themselves facing those masks which, falling, reveal to the world who we really are.