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Black shawl - like reading many news articles from a newspaper in Pirandellian prose.
«Black Shawl» (1900): two boys, both orphans, are taken care of by the older sister of one of them. The brother of this sister becomes a lawyer, the friend becomes a doctor. Having set aside artistic ambitions for fear of the gossip in that too provincial environment, rejected numerous suitors, and now in her forties, she finds herself without purpose in life. When the story begins, the brother expresses concern for the health of this virtuous sister. Along with the friend, they go to her house, but she now refuses to speak to anyone; however, under pressure, she asks the doctor for help to end it all...
This was the situation. Shortly before, she had decided to move to the countryside, where she found her neighbors to be rich farmers, whose son was struggling in his studies for which he had no aptitude.
For one reason or another, she decides to help the boy, he falls in love with her, she pushes him away, but a playing piano draws him back to her, and in a dark corner, he rapes her.
What will become of her?
How will the story end between the cultured violated forty-year-old and the rough violator?
How many men and women are mocked by fate? They're all here, or rather, without exaggeration, here we have a vast sample.
Ah, the tales, the tales…
In the twenty-first century, readers of creative prose can only rely on novels to meet the most ambitious and celebrated contemporary writers. Too many centuries of novelistic hegemony have led to this, so much so that one might say the novel can be crowned the literary genre of the modern age.
Too many difficulties, too many crises it has managed to overcome in its history to still have doubts about its fundamental role…
... too many masterpieces have overturned its characteristics from the ground up, so that it could become a genre so mutable as to adapt to societal changes: from Cervantes to Flaubert, from Tolstoy to Dostoevsky, from Kafka to Proust…
too many illustrious predecessors have been found in ancient literatures…
It hasn't always been this way, especially in Italy.
Tales, tales, and more tales. Collected and organized in a thousand different ways, they offered a polyphonic picture of reality. Daughters of oral literature, they were read aloud, not privately like our pocket novels…
... they encompassed everything, and if they also served as a lesson and warning for the listener, the means to pursue it was delight. And delight transformed from a means into an objective. Do you remember the laughter and tears with which Boccaccio's ten young people welcomed them?
...and again: how many tales did Shakespeare and companions “steal” to amuse the emerging English society?
…
All of this, Pirandello handled personally: he wrote tales for a lifetime, tackled the novel as demanded by the era, and translated these tales into plays: from Think About It, Giacomino! to The License, from The Other Son to The Lord of the Ship Festival.
The Black Shawl is the first collection of Novels for a Year, dated 1922.
The project was ambitious, to begin collecting what were supposed to be three hundred and sixty-five stories, one for each day of the year, each telling a noteworthy case in its own way. Told the Pirandello way, of course. And here's the first:
In «First Night», in a small village, a widow raises her only daughter, sacrificing herself completely. She had lost both her father and her husband, a dockworker, in an accident where he and several colleagues died. However, when she and her mother arrived at the scene, someone noticed that the young girl didn't cry in front of her father's body, but instead ... Coming of marriageable age, arrangements were made with an elderly widower, a gravedigger at the cemetery.
Crying, tears, desperation, and hysteria captured the girl's soul.
The day came, then the wedding night… at the bride's request, she accompanied him on a patrol tour. And before one grave, and she before another grave, they stopped to cry and talk to those who were no longer there…
Remarkable!
Then, in «The “Smoke”», the tale of a sulfur mine owner, then landowner, who fell into ruin twice, is told. In «The Tabernacle», «Defense of Meola», «The Fortunate Ones», «Since It’s Not Raining…», in honor of tradition, one sees church characters in action. To the "fortunate ones" in particular, one of these will reserve a cruel joke.
Other similar cases and situations are found in this disorganized collection, where passengers from various backgrounds struggle to free themselves from the trap they have fallen into since birth.
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