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It is not easy to talk about this book or, rather... what perspective should one choose, or prefer, to try and focus on what the story of Piero Tarticchio wants to tell us? I speak, indeed, of preference because there is the temptation to limit the discussion to pure literary invention: a heartfelt symphony of many voices, often non-human. For many pages, it feels like being immersed in the imaginative world of Disney comics: people, cats, mice, and birds talking to each other, with a Charon serving as a link between reality and the mythical. I said it seems... it seems, because History with a capital H is lurking, and it will have no regard for anyone.
I must admit that in the first pages, the story fails to grip me; the narrative play adopted by the author seems verbose and overly, though deliberately, fanciful. There is a clear attempt to prolong the tension of storytelling as much as possible, a contrivance that finds its tool in the Dantesque (ultra)terrestrial story of his beloved cat. It will be the initially discreet, then central role of Primogenito (or Torpedine) within the novel that will lead the story to its natural unfolding. It is here that the author gives his best. The extraordinary characterization of this pseudo "village idiot", a character worthy of Fellini, is the highest point of the novel. Through the lines, one can sense the writer's love, an immediate empathy with the reader grows, and a desire to believe that such a special person truly existed somewhere, to meet them. He is the Charon I mentioned earlier, he will be the glue for many stories, sometimes happy, other times grotesque, often tragic, ultimately infused with contagious hope for a better future.
The protagonist will always and forever be Mother Earth, the beloved Istria, loved even more after the violation it endured, a debt paid for faults not its own and on behalf of an entire nation, without this nation knowing or even imagining that up here, in this strip of land in the far northeast, a tremendous drama took place. Every episode of the novel reeks of nostalgia, heartbreaking and desperate, pages that seem to emit the scent of sage and rosemary, and then the impetuous breeze of the wind, and the splendid sea, the sun-battered rock, and the chatter of people still unaware of the looming misfortune. In every page, the author infuses his culture, his soul, prescient of catastrophe. A storyline that is not difficult to perceive as deeply autobiographical.
Some years ago, Anna Maria Mori wrote in the extraordinary "Bora": — Can you live without the little girl or boy you once were, a little or a long time ago, without their places... without the certainties gained simultaneously with the use of speech... without the dialect, the taste of tender radicchio from the 'first cut'... without schoolmates? — Without, without, without. To live a life, thousands of lives, 'without'. Knowing it will be forever and that, if there might be redemption, others will enjoy it, leads to a halved existence, an invisible yet not lesser impairment.
I must insert a personal note here. These events, which for most have no connection with lived reality, are not entirely disconnected for me. My paternal grandparents lived through these events firsthand, and my father is part of the first generation born after the diaspora. A thin thread connects the existence of the novel's characters to mine, and that generation, by the law of nature, is slowly fading away. It will remain in the consciousness and memories of those who will desire, as the author does with pen dipped in blood, unfortunately not just metaphorical, the task of perpetuating this dramatic historical phase. A languid sense of impotence and unhealthy realism aligns me with the author's final sentences. The questions that Piero Tarticchio poses have not received an answer, nor will they. Even the institution of the Day of Remembrance became an occasion for political manipulation, crude and vulgar precisely because it is instrumental. Thus it is, and, I believe, thus it will be. Unfortunately.
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