(ANSA) – ROME, 03 NOV – MAURIZIO MAGGIANI, ” THE ETERNAL YOUTH ” (FELTRINELLI, pp. 282 – 18.00 euro)
Persevering, those losers who never give up, eternally young in the stories of others, are the characters always told by Maggiani, from Saverio of the “ Courage of the robin ” to Giacomo of “ The unadorned queen ”, from the groom de ” Love ” up to Garibaldo or the Canarina and the Artist of the latter novel, which is dedicated by the author himself ” to the persevering ”, and it is as if he pulled the strings of all the others.
From the expedition of the Thousand, to which Armando as a young boy, later known as Garibaldo, will participate in Quarto because, boldly throwing himself into the water, he will be hoisted aboard the steamer by Garibaldi himself, who since then will always follow, up to Caprera and will fall in love with Esfir , a Russian princess fleeing the Tsar’s persecutions, we come to her great-great nephew Menin and the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa. They are 160 years of Italian history, told through a dynasty of persevering, of rebels obstinate in pursuing their dream, in remaining faithful to an ideal, despite the fact that history does nothing but persecute and disillusion them. After all, “ We are not ashamed of love ” is one of the first statements of this family of “ surly and impertinent ” that if they are ashamed of something it is to have behaved badly and given pain to others, as happens to Saverio, known as the Artist, who is then, using us, the narrator of this family epic from the Marassi prison where he is locked up. After Garibaldo, the real red thread of this choral story, but in which individuals have their precise, stories and identity told, is the daughter of these, called Anita and called the Canarina, born with the century in 1901, who always having something what is important to do is how he managed to postpone his death up to 117 years by becoming ” the oldest human being in the world ”.
It is the emblem of the anarchic gesture of those who hold life in their hands and want it to be free from all power, against which everyone ends up fighting, always singing and giving his individual contribution to a collective revolt in the name of a life and a world a little better. And there is always hope, with the young Menin that perhaps he will see better times, after hard years. And alongside these simple heroes of everyday life that literature makes true even if they are invented, Maggiani brings to life significant and important characters, from Garibaldi to the anarchist Bresci, to Carlo Tresca, an anarchist who emigrated and engaged in the struggles of American workers, or Franco Serrantini killed from a police charge in 1972 while the MSI was demonstrating, but also others, forgotten, of which he recovers the singular stories such as Pierino Pesce, killed at the age of twenty by the fascists in 1923, up to Sandro Pertini, an exemplary figure of persevering against all injustice. And the same goes for their private events connected to historical events such as the riots of 1898, the killing of King Umberto I in Monza in 1900, the strike of textile workers in America in 1934, the anti-Nazi resistance and so on (as they explain also some Historical Notes in the appendix by Giorgio de Vecchi and Marco Fossati), passing from Genoa to Tsarist Russia, from the Rio Grande in South America to the streets and factories of New York. Speaking of this “ Eternal Youth ”, a reference was made to Garcia Marquez and Maggiani, who worked with more realism, a beautiful fantasy and less magic, confessed to having begun to write it fresh and rereading ‘ ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. But the strength of these pages is in the writing, in a storytelling trend felt thanks to the rich adjective and that makes the page come alive without making color and even less rhetoric, with that we who addressing the reader is as if he understood him, making him immediately a participant witness of a memory that finds its meaning in the words that do not make it go lost.
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Source From: Ansa
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