“Everyone is afraid and feels alone, and life is everyone’s prison.”
Elba is a young teenager forced to live inside a psychiatric facility in the early eighties. Her only fault is that of being the daughter of a woman hosted in the facility, and when she passes away, rather than being sent to an orphanage, she remains living in the asylum, although she has no diagnosis of insanity.
Doctors, nurses, supervisors and patients, each committed to playing a well-defined role, but ready to exchange them without realizing it. Elba’s stories accompany us to discover a world of abuse, harassment and unexpected acts of mercy.
Part of the rigid rules are broken by the arrival of doctor Fausto Meraviglia. A strong supporter of the Basaglia law, which recently came into force, Meraviglia will give patients the opportunity to express their discomfort. A return to normality denied for too long, and silenced by drugs and electroshock. Thus the personalities of women locked up without a real diagnosis of mental illness begin to blossom, but perhaps because they are too talkative, because they become a burden on their families, or simply because they are the daughters of an original sin that no one wanted to absolve, like Elba.
The relationship between Elba and the doctor Meraviglia will accompany the development of the story, with a recognition of mutual weaknesses, and the birth of a feeling of mutual respect, to which perhaps neither of them has ever been accustomed.
Let’s focus instead on the writing style: linear, without excess, straight to the point. She makes reading enjoyable, so much so that you can read the entire text in a very short time, without any particular effort. We would have liked a few more flaws, a greater even poetic intensity in some key passages, being able to know the taste of some emotions, and even being lowered into the mental hospital with a resistant and safe rope of words, but perhaps this is just a question of personal tastes. Do we recommend it? Difficult to say, we had high expectations when we started reading, which then ended up stranded like the remains of a ship wrecked on an uninhabited island, so we were left with a bitter taste in our mouths; maybe you start reading it with less high expectations than ours.
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Viola Ardone, Grande Meraviglia, Einaudi, Torino, 2023