Enrico Stabellini
Inganni del cuore

LA RECENSIONE

The novella I am about to review, unfortunately, is a huge and colossal NO. For goodness' sake, if someone liked it, I'm only glad for it, but personally, I found it truly heavy.

I am talking about Deceptions of the Heart, the third novella by Prof. Enrico Stabellini. Unlike the novella that precedes it, namely The Last Summer, the text at hand addresses the issue of euthanasia, a theme closely related to bioethics, and that can be approached from two different perspectives: from a 'secular' perspective, where euthanasia seems not to want to be fully regulated by the legislator, and from a more theological point of view, where sweet death is morally illicit.

In this story, Professor Stabellini addresses euthanasia from a purely secular point of view, and he does so with absolute delicacy, for goodness' sake, but it's as if he wants to scatter crumbs of bread here and there, saying, yes, that Denise (the deuteragonist of the story, behind whom, as far as I'm concerned, with a very clever device [which brings to mind Giovanni Verga of 'The House by the Medlar Tree' and 'Red Malpelo'], the author himself hides), a police officer and niece of Miriam, Amedeo's wife, the protagonist of the story, being part of the State Police, brings to the story her firmness in stating that euthanasia is illegal, but from another point of view, this could also be Stabellini's own opinion.