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Ilaria Vitali, "La casa ai confini del tempo"

Review

By Patrizia PoliPublished about a year ago 3 min read
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Ilaria Vitali, "La casa ai confini del tempo"
Photo by Erik Odiin on Unsplash

All those who have approached Ilaria Vitali’s “The house on the edge of time” have spoken of a bildungsroman, of the end of childhood and, above all, of the perfect mimesis of childish language, as can be found, for example, in in the books of Niccolò Ammaniti or the Neapolitan writer Ida Verrei. In my opinion, however, it is a much more literary operation. The style of the text, in its artificial simplicity, is absolutely, exquisitely, refined, there is no realism or adherence to childish speech or thought, but rather a surrealism rich in symbols, allegories: a thought-out form, which does not leave nothing to chance, and is poetic and not at all childish.

Eleven-year-old Zoe spends a summer in her grandparents’ house, by the great river, in the hot, languid and sunny Po valley. Life flows around, it’s 1992, Tangentopoli wipes out the first republic, but Zoe and her family are suspended in a bubble. The main characters are Zoe herself, her mother, her grandparents, her neighbor friend, his father. Some extras enter and leave the scene like actors on a stage: cousin Iris, the carabinieri, the gypsies. There is nothing realistic, nothing “normal” about what happens, everything has a hidden meaning.

There is another figure who towers in his absence, and resizes — even crushes — in his newfound presence: Zoe’s father, the pivot of the story, the one who, with his conduct, set in motion the catastrophe, resulted in the repressed, what Zoe’s mother now calls “the crossing.”

“Things have been talking to me for some time now,” Zoe begins. Yes, things speak to those who know how to listen, things have hidden, surreal aspects, as in a painting by Magritte or De Chirico. The house is “a train house” capable of moving on an ideal line that should carry forward, into the future, and instead returns in the footsteps of a canceled, removed past. The coffee pot bleeds, the stairs break, the walls crack, the tulips commit suicide. Zoe herself also looks at reality from an unreal perspective, doing the handstand against the wall upside down, or remaining motionless and silent like the grass.

“Anyway, the thing about the things that speak to me has been happening for a few months. Since I turned eleven, to be exact. At night, for example, I hear strange noises. I know it’s them. It’s wood that creaks, a wall that cracks. The table wants to go back to being a tree and the concrete sand of the sea.”

The little girl grows up, discovers the world of adults, rationalizes and makes fun of but does so in a way that dangerously approaches the possibility of madness. It takes little time for speaking things to turn into dangerous voices in the head, for the immobility of pretending to be grass to become irreversible silence.

To save her, however, there is Mujo, “an oasis of light in the dark”, the gypsy, the outcast, the soul in which Zoe recognizes herself and which keeps her captivated to reality.

“Mujo and I are almost on the tracks, our steps pierce the dark, sure. Now no one can stop us. This is kairos, the right time.”

Kairos, therefore, and not just any infantile love, not the first beats of the heart.

“Tonight the wind is blowing in a place where the wind never blows and everything is allowed.”

Yet, this narration all made of symbols and signs, this “profane mandala drawn by chaos”, as the author herself defines it, is also terribly compelling, it drags you from one short chapter to another, waiting for the epiphany, for the revelation which makes that summer so different from the others and makes things speak to Zoe. It is the event that will have to happen, the enigma to be revealed, the imponderable that takes the form of the synecdoche of a bracelet, of a line on the wall to delimit a half-blocked growth.

And it is also this language so full of meanings, breezy and funny, ironic and enjoyable, proof of a narrative talent full of promise but already mature and sharp, the kind you usually don’t expect in a newcomer.

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About the Creator

Patrizia Poli

Patrizia Poli was born in Livorno in 1961. Writer of fiction and blogger, she published seven novels.

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