“The province still has the colors of the past.”
Getting out of prison and trying to find your place in the world again. Finding any way to avoid being judged by looks as heavy as sentences, after you have already served a sentence. Getting out of the quicksand of invisibility in which you have been locked up, and when you are sure you have gotten out, that you have found freedom, find yourself inside again.
This is the story of the book’s protagonist: Maria. Do not look in the pages of the text for the reason for her guilt or her sentence: the author will intentionally never reveal it. The pivot of the story is after leaving prison and not what she has done in her past. What is communicated to the reader is Maria’s loneliness, left alone by her parents and sister, and so she finds herself perhaps knowingly begging for love from anyone she meets.
The theme of social reintegration is the dust under the carpet of modern society, as if hiding a problem, denying its existence, could represent a solution. Dramatic situations that if not resolved, facilitate the tendency to commit crime again, and therefore to return to prison, in an endless cycle.
The final question that the reader is left with after reaching the last page is: how can Maria get out of the prison that lives inside her?
While reading, one has the idea of browsing through Maria’s album of memories with old and recent photos put together without a precise chronological order, and perhaps this is certainly its most realistic component, because who hasn’t happened to seek refuge in memories when the present is difficult to face?
We read it with great pleasure, because we think it is a theme that should be addressed more and more often in literature and beyond. The reintegration into society of those who have served a period of detention is too often left to the charitable hand of associations and cooperatives, without a real institutional path.
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Alberto Schiavone, Non esisto, Clichy, Firenze, 2023