Belotti Elena Gianini

The book consists of a series of short stories dealing with foreign migrants in Italy. In the first, *The Turban*, a Sikh arrives in our country fleeing poverty and finds work on a farm in Tuscany. A process of rapprochement begins, both cultural and personal, between the landlady and the immigrant, leading the former to the discovery of a world and the latter to gradually assimilate into the customs of our country: discarding the turban and shaving his beard represent the visible manifestation of the rupture with his country of origin. In the second story, *Short Circuit*, a power outage in a Roman neighborhood allows the protagonist to discover a camp of Romanian migrants in an abandoned field adjacent to the apartment building. They are the cause of the short circuit, having illegally tapped into the electrical grid; the repairs will also entail the destruction of the squalid dwelling (a hovel without running water or sanitation) in which these poor people lived. The third story, *School Bus*, is undoubtedly the finest, as it joins the theme of immigration with that of childhood. A young girl has a Filipino girl as her babysitter. Usually, it is her mother who walks her to the school bus, a yellow bus. One day, however, the mother falls ill, and it is the Filipino babysitter who takes the girl to the stop and, despite her protests, puts her onto another bus, a blue one. The child thus ends up spending several days at a different nursery school, with different teachers and classmates. She desperately tries to tell her mother about the mistake, but she is not believed; on the contrary, she stokes growing concern in her parents over these fantasies and alleged lies. Eventually, the mother realizes the mistake, but the Filipino girl's blunder has allowed the child to discover a new world. The fourth story, *Suspicions*, centers on two migrant women, a Ukrainian and a Filipina, who care for two elderly women, both in wheelchairs. Due to a momentary lapse of attention by the two young women, a fatal accident occurs: both elderly women die, triggering a police investigation that will ultimately exonerate the caregivers. Finally, the last story, *The Seagull*, takes its title from Chekhov's work of the same name. The narrative is profoundly bleak: a Ukrainian woman, involved with an Italian man, longs to be reunited with her son, who stayed behind in her country of origin. She receives a marriage proposal from an elderly man for whom she works as a caregiver. His children object and cast her out, leaving her without a job. Furthermore, her Italian partner reacts violently, and she decides to leave him, finding herself alone once more. The stories trace a progression both stylistic and thematic. In terms of narrative rhythm and linguistic structure, the author gains ever greater confidence, moving from a style still hesitant and reliant on reflections to increasingly effective narrative modes that allow the meaning of events to emerge from the storytelling rather than from commentary. Likewise, the author moves from discovery to a growing awareness of a desolation and loneliness that is no longer sociological, but existential. In the first story, the cultural and social question still prevails, albeit informed by a writerly sensibility. > The reason I hold back the questions on the tip of my tongue is not merely the difficulty of communicating, but rather the conviction of intruding, with an overly casual and blatantly Western indiscretion, upon his private world, light-years removed from our own, and therefore virtually ungraspable . By the end of the book, the answer to this search for communication is loneliness, which nonetheless envelops both migrant and Italian alike. > You remember words Chekhov? Trigorin says he feels like fox that dogs run after, so feel I. I run, run, run, and dogs run even inside legs. And Masha says that when love enters inside heart, better no, better chase away, better forget. I better without, I better alone . Yet perhaps the answer is to be sought in the openness to discovery that animates the child in *School Bus*: the Filipino girl's mistake allows her to discover two profoundly different nursery schools, one modern and one of a traditional-religious cast, yet the girl likes them both, and her true concern remains her mother's affection. Why read it? It is an ostensibly slender book, yet genuinely profound. It is a pleasure to read and holds within it a veritable minor masterpiece: the story of the little girl with the *School Bus*.