Arturo's Island

One of my earliest boasts had been my name. I had soon learned (it was he, I think, who first informed me of it) that Arturo is a star: the swiftest and most radiant in the figure of Boötes, in the northern sky!. Thus begins Arturo Gerace’s long quest for Love:

an indecipherable dilemma, without the solace of hope, or of revenge

a land of adventure, a blessed garden!

a bewitched and voluptuous mansion. The novel encompasses three distinct natures, profoundly intertwined: the narrative, the fantastic, and the oneiric. Orphaned at birth, Arturo was nursed on goat’s milk by the foster-nurse Silvestro. He grows up alone in a ruined Castle. His father is perpetually traveling, and the boy roams across the island and along the shores. Arturo lives freely yet melancholically, fulfilled only when his father is at home.

My childhood is like a happy land, of which he is the absolute ruler! (...He who strode resolutely forward, like a sail in the wind, with his blond, foreign head, swollen lips, and hard eyes, looking no one in the face. And I followed behind him, proudly casting my dark eyes to the right and to the left, as if to say: “Men of Procida, my father is passing!”. This adoration is unmarred by the brusque and severe manner the father displays toward Arturo, nor is it broken by the arrival of the stepmother, a girl barely older than Arturo (who was then fourteen), perhaps married on a whim. The boy’s relationship with his stepmother wavers between jealousy and attraction, typical of an adolescent undergoing his first stirrings of love and perpetually searching for a maternal figure. One day, the father returns to Procida accompanied by a convict, who is locked up in the island's penitentiary. The man grows taciturn, no longer wanting to walk or sail with his son; instead, he frequently vanishes to sing a love serenade beneath the convict's cell. Arturo's infatuation with his father dissolves painfully, especially when he overhears him being dubbed a “Parody” by the malicious convict: a pitiful imitation of a man of the world, of a great traveler, when

it will be a stretch if he even made it as far as Benevento, or Rome-Viterbo!. Arturo enters adulthood because he sees his father in his true nature, selfish and petty: he must also leave the marvelous island, overly steeped in joyful roaming and anxious anticipation. Adolescence has ended; Arturo sets out to discover the world and resolves to go to war. Thus far, we are faced with a coming-of-age novel, at times verbose and banal. What renders it original and compelling are the narrative’s fantastic and oneiric dimensions. Consider the ascent toward the Penitentiary, trailing behind the father: the alleyways of the ancient village, the narrow, climbing streets, the walls plunging sheer over the island's high cliffs made the Penal Colony look like the

Castle of the Knights of Syria; fairy-tale adventurers (...) crowded that walled palace

a funereal Knight Errant, (...) and the voices of the village not far off (...) seemed to me the voices of a childish race. A central episode of the novel takes on fairy-tale suggestions, evocative of distant, fabulous worlds and spoken tales. Consider, on the other hand, the image of the seashell, a dreamy naturalism applied to a celestial phenomenon.

Outside the midnight window, (...) a tiny cloud could be seen which, drifting across the turquoise of the sky, within moments took first the shape of a seashell, then of a small hot-air balloon, then of an ice cream cone, then of an old man's beard, then of a ballerina. Reality, fantasy, and dream hybridize, and the narrative tones blur; the novel bears less and less resemblance to a coming-of-age tale (a sort of Neapolitan Treasure Island, see the review of Treasure Island on this site) and increasingly assumes the imagery and cadence of The Thousand and One Nights (see the review on this site).