Donatella Di Pietrantonio novel the community silence after a crime

The covid pandemic begins and Amanda returns home to her mother, to a town in Abruços. He has changed and the illusion he had that Marx had to study Milà has disappeared. Almost does not speak, and the mother, Lucia, pateix.

“Marxing or turning from a small town of provinces is one of the fears that so many people who live in the interior are raised at some point, sovint a doubt continues not resolved”, explains Donatella Di Pietrantonio (Arsita, Italy, 1962) about the start of L'edat fragil (Edicions 62/Duomo, award Strega 2024), and affirms that “the majority return to Marxar, but they do not integrate into the great city and, like Amanda, return to search for the answers to it.” The writer did not solve it, because “the revolutionary action of literature is, precisely, trying to ask the questions, finally and all the most uncomfortable.”

Amanda's twist serves the narrator to "unearth the incident that no one will ever ignore, the silence that an entire community has maintained over a fet that is considered inconceivable that had happened in that community: a double feminicide, and a survivor." This collective trauma in an idyllic setting – a real fet that occurred in 1997 in the author's region – “will demonstrate not only that this crisis was not safe, but also that it has not captured the truth that followed truly safe for the gifts.”

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Another central theme is the intergenerational relationship, between the vicar, the mare and the girl: "It is interesting to show how this small community of farmers, of shepherds, passes from a primitive gairebé condition, ancestral gairebé, to modernity in three generations. She tries to disguise and feign her rural origin, beginning with the dialect, to the very latest of the valley so stagnant, so small, so hooked. It is also the story, naturally, that it is so rural but it remains, trapped between its walls and the forest, as it passes through so many gifts of mitjana edat, but when a cos repeats so many tensions of opposing directions it is possible. trencar.”

In fiction, the crime happens in a campsite that ends up being the property of Lucia: "The land represents that trauma, which will be personal, family and the entire community, but it has not been metabolized. Since the community has not verbalized that passat, the campsite is going to be degrading and is vandalized, and finally it will be the third generation, that of "Amanda, the one who is most involved, will have to decide her future, so that neither her father nor her mother will come to decide a future of change and transformation."

In another plot twist, the land is the object of the covetousness of a hotel group, but the one who advises it is precisely to activate the veïns: “Italy, and my territory in particular, saw very intensely this conflict between opening up to tourism, which ends up quickly becoming mass, or trying to protect a territory that it is fragile, with the human characters of the novel. The fet d'haver deixat obert this final is simptomàtic and rebel that we have not trobat the solution and oscil·lem between two pols, remain amagats in these precious llocs that nothing more than us saltres coneix and protect the territory or open us to this. tourism that could contribute riquesa, but what will do the best will be to expose the territory to great people.” “Design a slow, quality tourism, that respects the lands and the environment, but it is a balance that is really very difficult to achieve,” the writer insists.

Di Pietrantonio portrays an insecure woman, with a strong feeling of guilt “that has a superficial cause and an other hidden one”, he assures: “The superficial part could have a view with the fet that on the day of the crime she had gone to sea and she is not going to invite her friend Doralice, who is going to help the trauma she faces, but Lucia is not going to expressly, so she faces that I felt guilt, it is not justified. But who is, in other words, the deep feeling of guilt that you have? Who is ashamed of Doralice because she speaks in dialect, she does not know how to speak, she is evil, and she is afraid of the label of being a girl of poor money. The writer, in fact, recalls that "the political unification of Italy has not corresponded to a real unification, since the Italian language as a national language makes it easy to blend. But there remain the dialects, which are very similar and have many different consequences, and there are consequences, because those that vam neixer in territoris de l'interior se'ns a linguistic competence is going to be required in Italy, but at home, with families, in towns, speaking names in dialect, so our peers, on the lower grades of school, do not speak Italian, so that for me, I buy Lucia or Doralice in the novel, the language maternal, which He is a family speaker, it was a language of shame, and I realized that my society is totally bilingual and I have maintained a strong link with my native language.” “Avui – the author continues – to Italy, some dialects have a high literary dignity, both written form and literature, but not elsewhere, because they speak only a few thousand people are very limited to the interior, without interchanging outside. Furthermore, and in parallel, proportionally to the loss of population in the interior zones, the dialects are disappearing.”