Mariolina Venezia

Time fills up "with interminable, communicating galleries," a labyrinth that is by no means guaranteed to lead anywhere. At the heart of the book lies an existential premise: life is a succession of unpredictable crossroads, able to find solidity and certainty only in the pursuit of one's roots, one's land, and one's ancestors. Gioia is a young woman from Matera who has fled in search of a freedom that neither her mother, nor her grandmother, nor she herself would ever have been able even to imagine. She traverses > a brief season of freedom and belonging, lost in the crowd, in the Italian piazzas, Rome, Bologna, Florence Ponte Vecchio, sleeps with a Swiss boy with skin as smooth as a girl's.... shouts the slogans P38 a hole blooms in your mouth, is moved by the sight of red flags, uses their poles as clubs, pulls the red kerchief down over her face, thinks she has the future in her hands . Inadvertently entangled in terrorism, she flees to Paris, where she works as an actress, takes a job in an erotic call center, and loses herself among many men, more often than not allowing herself to be used. Ma quando > she had become a young woman as perfect as inorganic matter, removed from the unpredictability of time she wonders > what is the point?, to whom would she answer? Now that she could be anyone, she was no longer anyone . Then she feels the urge to retrace backward, > moment by moment, everything that had led there. And so, without realizing it, you lose yourself in history . Gioia traces the history of her ancestors back to Grottole, a small town in Basilicata. The starting point is 1861, the year of Italian Unification, and from there she sets out to narrate the fortunes of her family—in particular, of the women who were decisive through their strength and character. The result is at once a social and familial narrative: a fresco of an impoverished and neglected Italy, stagnant for a century before rapidly transforming during the economic boom years after 1960: the dissolution of family ties, of a communal life that represented both the cage and the strength of peasant society. Emblematic, in this respect, is the bleak everyday existence of Gioia’s parents, Rocco and Alba, who watch the same television program in separate rooms, when such incommunicability is contrasted with the lives of their grandparents and great-grandparents, who worked, ate, quarreled, and lived entirely together. That world, once so steadfast and serene, is no more. Gioia, departing anew, sees from the train that > the rolling countryside that had cradled her nostalgia, nostalgia for a cherished sorrow, for tears, for unfulfilled curiosities, for imprisonment, had now lost its virginity. She, who had kicked against it, now mourned its loss and silently held a tearless funeral for it . The book can be divided into two parts. The first, set in Grottole, is a reconstruction—almost a historical investigation—of a social and familial structure. The narrative pace suffers precisely from this descriptive approach, which only in flashes elevates itself toward the transfiguration of history and the deepening of the characters. The second part, describing Gioia’s life through the 1960s and 1970s, displays a modern style, at times disjointed yet effective in conveying the sense of the character’s "derailment." Particularly compelling are the pages in which the author pursues a sort of parallel history: the Gioia who could have been a respectable girl, university-educated, well-married, and with children, versus the real Gioia who has lost herself in the search for her own identity. The compulsion, perhaps, to say too much in too few pages leads to a cluttered narrative, a kind of haphazard jumble of actions and situations. The reader is left disoriented, unable to fully grasp Gioia’s story. Why read it? It is an enjoyable read, compelling in its historical reconstruction, and provides an effective contrast between modernity and tradition.