The protagonist of this literary debut from Stefania Bustelli is a fort town. This dark town, lost in space and time, is actually a lung, tumescent, full of metastasis, in which there live frail figures without an identity, who are trying to kill each other. The town is a creature, that has its own life, that breathes, eats, sleeps, dreams, prays and emits radiation; little by little, it is dying, along with all those who live there.
One day, a poor wayfarer ends up among its alleys. He doesn’t know how he got there, but more importantly, he doesn’t know how to go back; his only hope is to climb up above the summit of the highest bulge and find a way out. But to do so, he will have to overcome many challenges: presiding over cannibalistic banquets, loving and abandoning a human-limb collector, and praying to the god of this place through prehistoric artificial respirators. All for his salvation, all for his escape. To overcome the darkness that dwells outside and in.
An enormous bodily organ lies on the side of a mountain, protected by a prison of tall trees, in the silence of a sunlit landscape unknown to me. The hollow body of the long trachea of cartilage rises steeply up to the summit of the mountain, fusing with the calcareous tips. A thin membrane of cloud screens the spongy lobes gently spread out across the clay-rich shrub-filled floor. The diaphragm sinks into the wooded lowlands supporting this gigantic lung.
How did I end up here?