Fabio Geda

The story opens with Ercole and his little brother Luca on the roof of a shopping mall, with the police yelling at them to come down. From the narrative, we learn that Ercole is fifteen years old, living with his older sister Asia and an absent father who takes whatever work comes his way and frequently gets into trouble. Ercole knows full well that Asia «was strong, yes, brave, but not indestructible. Tied to me, but not with me». When his sister informs him that she is moving in with her boyfriend, Ercole realizes that «mothers contain. Everything. Brothers and sisters accompany». On an old bicycle, he sets off to find his mother in a small mountain village. He gets a flat tire, has to hitch a ride, must ask for money for a train ticket, and when he arrives at the village where his mother lives, finds it difficult to locate her home because she lives in an isolated house. Stubborn and brave, Ercole faces every obstacle and overcomes his fears, yet cannot vanquish the monsters within. He cannot bring himself to ask his mother the questions he longs to ask. > Why did you leave, exactly? (...) Why don’t you ask me if I missed you? (...) That’s just how things are, Ercole. And there’s nothing you can do about it Asia used to say. Then comes a turning point. > Hanging from a spike on the outer wall was an American football helmet, yellow, with the number ten in red . It belongs to Luca, his six-year-old brother. > Life is a billiard ball; every collision makes it change direction; and if you are strong and lucky enough, you can go anywhere . Now Ercole has someone to care for, to protect, even from the world of adults. And when, at Luca's birthday, the boy's father's friends try to get the little child drunk without the mother defending him, it is Ercole who steps in and whisks his little brother to safety. Boldly conquering his fear, he gets behind the wheel of a car. The police surprise him. > Would they have believed me if I had explained what had happened, that I was doing it for Luca? Would they have believed me or the adults? (...) And if they had believed me, where would they have sent Luca? Into whose custody would they have placed him? (...) I heard Obi-Wan's voice whispering to me: use the Force, Luke. Follow your instincts. I heard the cracks crumble and the monsters emerge from the walls. I shifted into first gear. I slammed the gas pedal to the floor. And I fled. If in nineteenth-century novels the adolescent becomes an adult by braving increasingly perilous trials, thereby winning their autonomy from grownups, today the youth always remains somehow tethered to the help of adults. Consider the contrast between Stevenson's *Treasure Island*, where Jim faces perils alone—from the tempest to the pirate Silver—and the story of Harry Potter, who overcomes evil thanks to the salvific role of the arch-wizard Dumbledore (see the reviews on this site: *Treasure Island* and *Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone*). In *Anime scalze*, magic happily does not come into play; yet fifteen-year-old Ercole manages not to slide «from confusion to despair» because he finds solid footholds in his older sister Asia and his girlfriend Viola, his peer and yet so steadfast and determined. Woven into the primary narrative thread—that of the *Bildungsroman*—are other ingredients: the fragility and emotional distance of adults, bottling up feelings and refusing to seek help, abandonment, love as a lifeline; too many overlapping themes that are never explored in depth, as though the author wished to touch upon every conceivable facet of adolescent malaise. Coupled with frequent nuggets of wisdom, this narrative dispersion often renders the tale verbose and predictable. A weakness of the narrative lies in its literary style. Unlike the novels co-authored with Marco Magnone (see the reviews on this site of *Berlin* and *Il lato oscuro della Luna*), it lacks narrative pace, the final pages aside; the prose is also frequently prosaic, stripped of context because Turin remains distant in its post-industrial desolation, while the frequent resort to clipped, terse dialogue feels like a lifeline thrown to a narrative struggling to move forward, rather than an effective device to express incommunicability. Why read it? It is a smooth read and examines youth malaise.

The novel bears the subtitle *The True Story of Enaiatollah Akbari*. It is, in fact, Akbari who recounts his journey from Afghanistan to Italy to Geda. Whether this is a literary device or an actual interview matters little; the journalistic reportage format lends the requisite credibility to the boy's tribulations, to his dream of freedom and peace. Akbari lives in northern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan: he belongs to a Shia ethnic minority persecuted by the Taliban. Still a child, he is forced to witness the execution by firing squad of his schoolteacher, who stubbornly insisted on keeping the school open. To escape Taliban repression, Akbari's mother takes him to Kandahar and entrusts him to an acquaintance who gets him across to Quetta, Pakistan. In this city, Akbari must find a way to survive, taking on even foul jobs such as unclogging sewers, submerged in waste. Quetta serves as a sort of crucible of formation, where Akbari learns to navigate adversity, picks up new trades—such as petty street theft—and meets other boys with whom to play soccer and dream of a better future. He has heard of > a lot of kids going to Iran. (...) I would hear these voices in the air, as if broadcast from a loudspeaker in place of the muezzin’s prayer; I sensed them in the flight of birds, and I believed them, because I was little, and when you are little what can you know of the world? Listening and believing were one and the same. I believed everything they told me. And above all, when one is still a child, one believes friendship gives such strength that any hardship can be overcome. Unfortunately, one later discovers that *in the sea there are crocodiles*. Akbari will realize this upon traveling to Iran and then to Turkey, always thinking he has found the right place to live. While the pages devoted to Quetta are still imbued with a sense of adventure—the places, people, and events portrayed as if in a dream of reality from which one might escape by returning home—later, in Iran, Turkey, and Greece, everything turns raw and vicious, and Akbari himself becomes harder, disillusioned, and ready to save himself even by abandoning his friends. Consider the sea crossing by dinghy to reach the Greek coast, when, amid the waves, they lost a friend:. > we kept rowing and shouting Liaqat's name. And rowing. And shouting. (...) Nothing. The darkness had swallowed Liaqat. At that point—I don’t really know how it happened: it must have been the exhaustion, it must have been the despair, it must have been that we felt too small, yes, infinitely too small not to succumb to it all—at that point, it just happened that we fell asleep. Now alone, Akbari manages to reach Italy, a wonderful, still welcoming Italy, where an unaccompanied minor received care and foster placement—and that was only fifteen years ago! In *Anime scalze* (see the review on this site), Geda writes that > life is a billiard ball: every collision makes it change direction; and if you are strong and lucky enough, you can go anywhere. Beyond the account of the journey—in which the most compelling aspect is Iran's role as a hinge and immigration country—Akbari's story is a coming-of-age novel that transcends its specific events. One reaches adulthood by facing and overcoming hardships, by learning from circumstance, not without a certain measure of opportunism and pragmatism. It is the happy ending that trivializes the narrative, imparting a cloying tone and thereby compromising the sheer drama of child migration. The novel maps out migrant itineraries, yet everything comes across as too easy, devoid of suffering other than the physical. Separation from family, parting from friends left to their fate, the abandonment of one's roots—all appear effortless, easy to overcome. Why not read it? In the end, it is banal.