“The people living have adapted: they have obtained beauty from the ruins.”
Get comfortable, concentrate and start reading Mothers’ Home.
It is not an easy book: it is a story of pain and suffering. So, dear readers, you may ask us why read it? Why do we knowingly do this harm?
But above all, what drives us to continue reading it? The answer to these questions will try to be our attempt to suggest reading them to you.
It is a strong story, in which the author, without half words or sweetenings of any kind, tells us how much suffering and how many injustices – whether intentional or not – can befall a common family, made up of a mother, father and two brothers who, beware , yes, they are twins, but intrinsically different though the same. Let’s clarify: Ernesto and Elia, the sons of Sarabanda and Speedy, were born on the same day, but Ernesto, as well as fate – or doctors, or gods, or a god, or chance – wanted, manifests a handicap that prevents him from using the entire left side of his body easily.
Here we are faced with the pure suffering of a child and then a boy who has to face his diversity, of an Elijah who has to live with a brother who is twin but also not, of a Sarabanda ready to show his son that he can do everything and of one Speedy, who can do nothing, abandons his family because he is unable to sustain this reality.
Let us return to the question “why continue reading?” We warn you: the author insists from the first to the last page on the suffering and effort of living together in this family, without sparing us anything, but here it is clear that we are in the presence of an author who is a real narrator; in short, as they say, someone who knows how to tell it to you, who knows all the narrative and linguistic expedients to keep you there, glued (we are not exaggerating) to these pages full of existential fatigue.
It is not only the story of this family, told and described starting from the generation of grandparents, because – the ancient Greeks taught us – you never escape from your lineage, from your family and from the defects that it carries with it. also our history. We talk about the effort of being a family, of being together and living together to understand and talk to each other; how one can love and then suddenly hate each other, in a continuous fluctuation of good or bad feelings, which only a family knows.
This is not a reassuring literature, far from it: it is existentialism, because the narrator tells us the story of his characters by very often asking direct questions which, on the one hand, are answered in the lives of the protagonists of these pages, on the other hand others answers echo in our minds as readers.
As we always like to do, we do not reveal the title in which all the preciousness of the life of our characters is kept.
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Daniele Petruccioli, Mother’s home, Terrarossa Edizioni, Alberobello, 2020
