“In the years between 1943 and 1948 a little girl discovers a new world, mysterious and wild, in a town on the coast, near Naples. A few years later, her father died, the girl experiences a continuous pilgrimage from one relative to another, all rather extravagant and bizarre. Finally, a few more years later, the scene moves to a closed environment, the house where the aged and lonely mother lives. To complete the training of the protagonist it will be necessary to go through the generational conflict.
Fabrizia Ramondino‘s first novel remains a staple in her narrative work. The autobiographical thread, the mythical transfiguration of childhood, the curiosity for faces and words, the background of the story, the path of identification, sometimes playful and sometimes tiring: these are all unmistakably intertwined elements that will return, reworked in different forms, in his later books.
The writer will be forced into a continuous nomadism, due to war, earthquakes, character and perhaps also to a stylistic destiny that will always make her stay in the syntactic space of the «between»: between languages, between cities, between writings, between people, between political and social tensions, between generations, between social classes; always looking for a “clear path” to follow; always ready to peel the skin off, and at the same time never denying, even in the worst moments, a relationship with the world and with others and above all with the sea.”
From the preface by Silvio Perrella