Salvatore Satta

A few years before his death, an illustrious jurist retraces his childhood in a timeless Nuoro; and > as in a developing negative, distant faces reappear, (...) and perhaps, as I think of their life, because I write their life, they sense me as a ridiculous god, who has summoned them on the day of judgment, to free them forever from their memory . It could easily be a mundane autobiography, interesting merely for its depiction of a Sardinia (between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) where there still existed > a magical sense of things, whereby every act was a ritual, every word the echo of another word, every occurrence a mystery , and the only hope was «to create ghosts to cling to». Were it only this, the book could rest forever on dusty shelves, alongside all too many family chronicles and nostalgic, often folkloric descriptions of a society that no longer exists and can never return. The novel endures, however, beyond its context, because it speaks of another matter altogether: death as the dissolution of memory. Since > each of us, even if we merely look within ourselves, sees ourselves in the fixity of a portrait, not in the succession of existence , the novel is likewise composed of characters and episodes that appear, at first glance, isolated and repetitive; the reader derives from it a sense of fragmentation and incompleteness, of a confused and superficial narration. One longs for more, especially when the author addresses the core of the narrative: the patriarch father, authoritarian and absent; the mother, seemingly marginal yet pivotal in the care of hearth and children; the numerous siblings; the manifold books gathered with love, through which > fantasy entered the austere house (...) and operated silently, touching men and things with its magic wand . We would like to know more of young Sebastiano (behind whom the author conceals himself), of his bond—both joyous and unhappy—with his brother Peppino, of their shared passion for bookbinding, of «a childish industry», meaningless perhaps, yet an expression of the «imagination of the gratuitous». Instead, we are left disappointed, for the myriad stories and characters must converge upon a single objective, both narrative and existential: the day of judgment, the extinction of memory, and with it, of existence itself. Sebastiano is on the verge of leaving Nuoro to study in Sassari. The author treats this episode fleetingly, almost as if he wished to forget it. Donna Vincenza, the mother of many children, > prepared his provisions with good breaded cutlets and sugar-dusted fritters. Sebastiano left it all behind, ashamed of his mother, (...) and departed in the dark of night, like someone eager to belong to others . And what of Pietro Catte, who had gone to the mainland to make his fortune, and who one day stepped off the coach, «amid sneers and taunts», and «like an automaton joined the procession», following the summons of the driver, > the devil himself, with horns and a pointed beard and a twisted tail , who led him to hang himself from a great oak tree. And Gonaria, who spoke with God and was betrayed because God let her brother, the canon, die; whereupon the poor woman locked her brother’s room forever, only to open it twenty-five years later and discover it had become a nest of mice, woodworms had devoured the furniture, and clusters of cobwebs hung from the ceiling. > If one does not die, one lives. And this truth, which seems obvious, is on the contrary fraught with consequences, because life transforms everything; nothing withstands its implacable truth. (...) To know oneself, one must play out one’s life to the very end, to the moment one is lowered into the grave. And even then, there must be someone to gather you up, resurrect you, recount you to yourself and to others, as in a final judgment . It is not an easy book: numerous characters and stories follow one another without any apparent order. Often one must pick up the thread of the narrative again; if instead one surrenders to it, the mind turns to oneself, to one's own life, to the memory of those who shared it with us, and to how this memory has dissolved over time, because «if one does not die, one lives». And then one realizes that it is not so important to keep a «chronicle» of existence as it is to wander in remembrance, because, as the author says, it is not a matter of another’s destiny, but of our own; and there comes a moment when we too face our final judgment. Aiding the reading is a refined, simple, and elegant prose: traces of juridical language can be glimpsed; far from being a flaw, this lends slowness and deliberation to the narrative; it is what one expects, and it keeps the portraits, their characters, and their stories from being trivialized. One must allow oneself to be ensnared by the tale, just as our memory, clouded by time, runs along the course of our life. Why truly remember the past, when it is better to be guided by the imagination? Only myth opens our hearts to mystery. Why read it? Pleasurable and profound.