Isabella Santacroce
Zoo

"Isabella Santacroce writes music, juggles tones, detaches cross rhythms and metric axes, organizes chaos, watches cross-eyed, prints dissonances. If you let her play...what you hear is music" [Alessandro Baricco]

THE ZOO OF SOULS

The zoo is a place of hidden sufferings, prolonged silences, suspended souls waiting to be born, but dying before seeing life.

This zoo is the family, one's home: just like the animal zoo, the family, the home, and personal belongings are seen as an extreme beauty by those who do not experience them, while those who are immersed in them end up finding heavy bitterness.

The protagonist of this alluring novel is a nameless girl, a woman without a soul. She hates her somewhat whorish and hysterical mother, loves her alcoholic painter father, who always abuses the daughter. Then, one day, the sudden death of the father already marks a tragedy about to develop: the impossible coexistence between two people who hate each other. The mother begins to console herself with a lover younger than her, and the daughter encloses herself in more or less total silence, until an accident deprives the girl of the use of her legs.

The resentment grows, more and more, until it borders on tragedy.

This novel by the writer Isabella Santacroce, which renounces the strong themes of "V.M. 18" and the lightness of "Fluo", describes in an almost aggressive and raw way the inner sadness that emerges with the rupture of daily habits, the loss of a loving person (in addition to sexual abuse, the protagonist seems to genuinely feel an incestuous passion towards the father), the forced coexistence with those one would like to kill.

The style is fluid, allegorical, suspended at that limit between rawness and poetry, managing to encapsulate eternal resentment in 130 pages. It does so by showing you what happens with the whitest white and the darkest black, the writing is tremendously visual and scratches the skin.

The plot, abstract and suspended, is just a backdrop: the novel focuses on internal emotions and emphasizes them, overwhelming the reader's heart.

Slashed veins, bleeding heart.

"Zoo": a novel where everyone hates each other, but no one kills. Where hatred is disguised as love (and perhaps turns into love) with the realization of a hypocritical erotic passion, exploding in an infusion of senses and flavors. And the father returns to visit wife and daughter.

The family is reunited again, in this zoo of wicker and tears.