Francesca Pansa, walking in pain

- FRANCESCA PANSA, 'NO NIGHT IS INFINITY' (Rizzoli, p. 157, euro 18.00).
'' '' A few days before Christmas she said to me: 'It will be my last Christmas, you will all have to be at the table, children and grandchildren, we must be united, promise that we will love each other, that everyone is really closer to the others, I want to prepare cuddurielli like every year ''. Instead that Christmas Soave did not celebrate it with his family but the trace of his life remained a little in the history of our country and very much in the heart of his daughter Francesca who in his own way, in a novel, a little wise, a little The family memory has retraced its significant existence back and forth. Not because Soave has accomplished heroic endeavors, if by heroism is meant what the history hibri got used to (erroneously in my opinion), but because heroism lived it day after day, hour after hour, in his combative daily life of a young southern woman with four children and a beloved husband politically committed to trying to give her family a better world. The teacher Ermanno who had chosen and loved her in an instant, on the notes of a popular song, he was the son of a teacher who was equally courageous and strong enough to challenge fatigue and prejudice. The grandson of a cobbler who is perhaps scanzafatiche but enlightened by an ancient wisdom, made of proverbs and quotes and 'gossip' from village bars. The wisdom of an anomalous Calabria, far from stereotypes, contained in these pages where we start from the narrow streets of Castrovillari to get to Rome, where in several stages, always painful, a family will always move, linked by love and passion.
Pages in which there are characters such as the uncles soldiers, Saverio and Giovanni, who died on the same day, together, on December 16, in the First World War in the trenches, so as to drive Grandma Saveria - the mother of Grandma Rosina - mad. for the pain. In short, lives lived in the various generations, always full of meaningful values, of characters that give the sense of the transformation of a world and of the battle of those who believed that acting is never useless and in this way has designed its existence. Figures that are expertly alternated in the book by Francesca Pansa with pages dedicated to great authors, and their relationship with the family, by Virginia Woolf and her mother Julia, Ennio Flaiano and her relationship with her daughter, Alberto Moravia who did not believe in dreams , the exile childhood of Aldo Rosselli. In short, pages rooted in today where universal and local are the threads of the same fabric of emotions.