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Rating: ....I don't know, Angelina,
where people go when they cease to exist.
But I know where they remain.
Don't move, reader who has cast your eyes on this page, please, don't move.
I will not tell you the story of Timoteo, chief surgeon in a Roman hospital. I will not reveal to you the thousands of thoughts that passed through his mind while a colleague operated urgently on his daughter Angela, a victim of a moped accident. I will not recount the long interior monologue he fictitiously addresses to his daughter, nor will I psychoanalyze his life or his relationship with his beautiful and perfect wife Elsa or the murky erotic attention for the suburban Italy, shabby and squalid as an amante should never be (nomen omen?).
Don't Move is a long prayer made of concise, dry, and nervous phrases, a long cerebral stream of memories where there is no room for a smile, only sadness and depression. Two lives on standby separated by the walls of an operating room, two open brains (one by a surgeon and the other by Margaret Mazzantini) fully available to the reader. A rollercoaster of emotions, in and out of the water, a dive into Timoteo's past and a short breath in Angela's present, a Dantesque limbo of spasmodic waiting for a departure towards the certainty of death or towards the uncertainty of life that might be.
Perhaps a clever, passionate, and feminine book where the man is weak and selfish and the woman submissive and exploited. A book where love is vivisected, by a surgeon writer, in its thousand forms and expressions in which the reader can easily categorize his every past experience.
A book with a very strong emotional charge, a narrative made more of slaps and punches than cuddles and caresses. I didn't move; I read it all in one breath. Mazzantini captured me perhaps because I am a weak and selfish man too.
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