DENTELLO CRUCIFIX, ‘TUAMORE’ (they ship, p. 124 – 17.00 EUR)
He called her from the beginning, from the first line, Carmella, by the name she could not bear and that he was provoking her and getting her out of her mind, as every child does when he plays with his mother. The character of this book is indeed the memory of Mother Milena, whom everyone knows, but also together with intimate facts and feelings it becomes words and writing, and therefore has liberating value.
The book, born after her death a year before a metastasis, in being precisely painful, acquires exemplary value and immediately removes all discourse associated with maternal love. He begins thus not declaring himself an orphan but: “A widower, just like my father, because you were the only woman in my life.” Thus, he shamelessly strips himself of his clothes, confirming afterwards that he has gone from saying my mother to calling her Melina as well, “when we became mates, when at a certain point we recognized ourselves as adults.”
Thus, every notation is true and palpable and at the same time acquires the literary force that only this fact is able to be reconfirmed. Milena in particular, who returns to us her tender, cheerful and sarcastic character, capable of irrepressible emotions and ridicule of the world and life, acquires the essence and becomes an attractive personality. Writing, in its variety, tactile and sometimes lyrical, brings it to life. And after a while we all become orphans of this woman who when her son fails high school 3 she goes with him to pick up the report card, takes it out on the teacher, protests in a turbulent way with the whole school and looks for the principal, but then, after he’s out alone, it’s right with the son He takes it out by giving him a ‘five flip of his face’, after publicly defending him beyond all reasonable.
The first part then is a series of memories that come to mind, revealing, personal, as a child then as a boy, closed, always alone, as if ‘contained under house arrest’, as ‘celibate’ son I never gave up the nest’. This is why you love him, and why you provoke him, because he is fat, because he has no girlfriend: “I always hope that he will accept sweets from strangers, who know that he will never make a friend.”
The second is the story, Melina’s narration: “I’m trying to walk your life away from the fact that you were my mother”, seen “with greater awareness”, now that she is no longer there. And so the story of a Sicilian girl from childhood was born “Very poor, never inhabited by sorrow,” the fourth of eight children, turned to play with grass and stones, among houses that are not houses, and hunger and petty robberies in a market. The father who goes to look for work in Germany, the grandfather in the north, in Cesano Maderno where he will gradually be able to reunite the whole family and even buy those four walls in which Crocifisso was born and brought up. Meanwhile, Melina had to marry her cousin and give up all the dreams she had in her head, and she was the one who read graphic novels and fantasized about love as told by Layala or Sviva Cassati Mudinani.
Then a portion of the so-called ‘tuamore’ tumor that has relapsed over and over will take her life so painfully, said with raw realism, she either doesn’t want to talk about it, or cuts it down to her unforgiving jokes. And he is also in this last path of absolute closeness and sharing: “When I gave up I thought that at that moment I ceased to be a son,” that is, “to be loved unreservedly,” this book serves Dentello to face his own pain, without fear “because pain is a memory” and helps him On this journey in search of Melina, who is in it, where she comes to put on her robe.
A book dense and light at the same time, precisely because it is the result of the greatest suffering but also able to dissolve it, to become for the cross like that balloon with a rainbow drawn and a springboard to bring, during the crisis of evil, writing ‘will go well’: ‘kind From magic, she says, it might work.” (handle).
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