“They had chased and waited for each other, only to meet again and again.”
Let’s go back in time. Catania in the late 1930s, with fascism in power, winds of war ready to become a storm, cowardice and meanness tacitly disguised as nobility of soul and rectitude.
Here two boys in their early twenties, Salvatore (known as Sasà) and Michele, meet one night on a beach and fall in love. A difficult love because the two come from two different social classes, Sasà a poor carpenter’s assistant, and Michele a university student about to graduate, son of the good bourgeoisie. However, what makes love impossible is homosexuality, seen as absolute evil, an evil against morality, to be fought and repressed and if necessary killed.
Sasà and Michele will be discovered and arrested, but while the latter will manage to obtain freedom thanks to the action of his father (more concerned about the good name of the family than for his son), Sasà will be taken into confinement on the island of San Domino together with other “arrusi”.
It is a book of secondary characters. The story of the two lovers who seek each other with their souls but cannot reach each other with their bodies is the heart of the story, but all the other characters who accompany them in the story are equally important organs, without which there would be neither Sasà nor Michele. This chorality of characters manages to fill even the parts in which the narrative drive seemed to us like an engine that struggles uphill.
For our personal taste, we would have liked to see a greater fresco of the contemporaneity experienced by the two protagonists, both in the language and in the dynamics of daily life. The hints at a possible outbreak of a world conflict could have been more colorful, and perhaps even some passages would have acquired greater incisiveness if written in dialect or with a different syntax. However, this does not take anything away from the beauty of the novel, which remains an excellent literary debut.
A good read that we recommend, capable of making you reflect on some themes, because the past is always present, both for better, but as in this case, especially for worse.
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Emanuele Firinu, Gli scordati, Sperling & Kupfer, Milano, 2023