Giulia Calfapietro: THE STORY OF A PASSIONATE SUFFERING

Giulia Calfapietro

“I am talking, now!” seems to be a novel as many others. A narration which moves among different events, situations, but which shows also places and characters while going on. While the story develops the protagonists make experience of hundred moods, emotions, feelings towards themselves and the other inhabitants of the plot. Everything happens like in an ordinary story, involving the readers who receive the right stimulus  to express their reactions in front of the topic from the various chapters.

Then, something magic, takes place: as the writer tells the story, the emotional past in the narration changes its aspect, it transfigures and moves from an individual dimension to a universal one. The book is not simply the terrible experience of Mary, her family, her daily life, her suffering and her expectations, but it transforms into the emotional story of any child, daughter, woman, lover and writer in wherever place in the world.

Mary finishes to represent that little child who is obliged to grow up in a squalid and humanly paralyzed condition, that young daughter unable to find confidence and loyalty inside her own family, above all in the relation with her own mother, that woman in a continuous search for love as both a satisfying destination and a safe refuge from all the evil of the earth. The protagonist loses all peculiarity belonging to her physical aspect or to her behaviour in front of all situations narrated in the plot and transforms into “the human being” living a deep condition of social misery and personal refusal.

Every nuance of her feelings stands out and draws attention onto itself, expands more and more till it takes up the whole virtual space of the readers’ imagination. In the end it dissolves, but only to give rise to a new emotion, as outsize as the preceding one.

All this is possible thanks to the author’s skilful manipulation of the language, enriched by a rare vocabulary, involving and sometime scaring because of its interpretative power, and decorated with laces of defleshing expressions and personal objective correlatives.

A great role in the atmosphere of the narration is given by the setting of the story that is sketched with female majesty. It’s about a strange mixture of poverty which is human, relational, social, historical, too. The poorness of all the characters in the book provokes cruelty, defeat, bullying, rudeness, ignorance, but also the inadequacy in living the own existence because of an emotional sterility which generates the narrow – mindedness and the immobility of the heart.

All the same the main keywords that go through all the story and characterize the final result about the readers’ experience inside the book are love and passion. Mary loves life deeply even if it has always been for her the source of the greatest sorrow and stabbing pain. She loves life because, even in its most terrible moments, she has been able to catch its perfumed intensity made of the intimate relation with natural elements and objective beauty: flowers, birds, together with the sea, the sky, the moon, the result of God’s wonderful creation, the evident proof of His charity power on human existence. Mary stands for “any Maries” able to find in the darkness of a bad living path the source of redemption, the highest meaning to the little human caducity. She can always disclose the hidden softness contained in the outlined caress of the life, even the most difficult one.

But this is also the story of a big passion which links in a strange sharing the writer and her protagonist. Writing is a strong need and a wish never completely satisfied for both. Words call other words and the smell of ink and paper is never sufficient. Writing is both the care for any sort of suffering, but it’s the disease itself, too. Mary knows she can overcome the struggles and the troubles of her life thanks to writing. It gives her a sense of relief, a vague and melancholic happiness: the only effective weapon to fight against all wrongdoing. All the same writing demands energy, and provokes falls in the face of menaces. In the end of the creation process Mary feels deprived of any strength and courage to keep on going.

Mary is conscious, as the writer is, life is not simply made of events, situations. Facts don’t exist in themselves. Everything needs to be narrated. Storytelling is fundamental to tell the others about. Life cannot exist without the narration of it as arts cannot be admired without the representation of it.

So Mary narrates the main episodes of her life underlining the emotional reactions to them. It is the indispensable process to communicate the spiritual essence of time passing. Similarly the author of this novel shows the readers her mastery in the management of the storytelling which imposes itself as the only way for herself and the readers to become an essential part of the sensitive life stream and to share instants of subjective existence transforming them into a universal spiritual meeting.