The young anger of the newcomer from Catania Mattia Insolia, the encounter with the disease and with the death of Anna Giurockovic Dato, the theme of the double and the metamorphosis for Michele Ainis, the passionate biography of an artist and an absolute love of Grazia Pulvirenti, the poignant family portrait narrated by Paolo Di Stefano. These are the five Sicilians competing for the Premio Strega in a record edition that includes 62 books proposed by the Friends of Sunday. The last 17 were reported yesterday and among these there is the novel by Grazia Pulvirenti from Catania, professor of German Literature at the Department of Humanities (as already anticipated by our newspaper in an article by Giusy Sciacca), with her “Do not paint my eyes. Intimate story of Jeanne Hébuterne and Amedeo Modigliani ”(Jouvence), proposed by Massimo Onofri.
Running to earn a spot in the first selection at 12 (March 22) there is also the very young Catania Mattia Insolia, 26, with the novel “The Hungry” (Ponte alle Grazie), in which he narrates the marginality and desperation of two brothers, Antonio and Paolo, 19 and 22 years years. “They have lived alone since their father died and their mother left home. Together they have built a daily life that, although precarious, seems to work. They live for the day, they get by in a present that does not allow them to develop future projects. And they live in a tiny town, an imaginary southern suburb that looks almost like a confinement, degraded and narrow. The existence of the two proceeds without great events, including hallucinatory nights, parties with friends, days at the beach and evenings of sex, alcohol and drugs. Until, then, something breaks ».
“It is not just a question of welcoming a powerful novel among the twelve nominees for the prize, characterized by an effective language and an intense gaze – writes Fabio Geda in his presentation to the Strega – but also to baptize an author who is here to stay. What’s precious, Insolia? Give the reader the keys to a certain urban and existential periphery. He invites him to live in the youth, loneliness and anger of Antonio and Paolo, the brothers who are the protagonists, so as to understand, or even just intuit, the youth, loneliness and anger of a part of the country and of our present ».
Candidate for the Witch already in 2017 with “The female daughter”, Anna Giurickovic Dato from Catania returns to the competition with the intense and moving “Il grande me” (Fazi) proposed by Angelo Guglielmi: “Writer of evident talent, richness of language, ability to speak, a mixture littered with reason and feeling, rude stylistic preciousness … If although written in the first person it is objective and a confession. He knows how to talk about something else (about others) and about himself. Crossed by an intertwining of love and rejection, of understanding and anger (cornerstones of life for her). How can you not love (and read) The Big Me? ». Proposed by Sabino Cassese “Disordini” (La Nave di Teseo) by Michele Ainis, jurist and constitutionalist from Messina, in which he recounts the metamorphosis of Oscar, «a professor of Law who one day looks in the mirror and discovers that he has become another “. “Ainis, in the third test with the genre – writes Cassese – is able to narratively tell a story that hides a deeper philosophical narration, taking up the line of development that goes from Ovid to Kafka, the authors of” poems about bodies that in a precarious are endangered ”».
The pain, the migration, the difficult relationship with the fathers are at the center of the Sicilian family epic of “Noi” (Bompiani), the passionate autobiography of Paolo di Stefano, writer and journalist born in Avola, signature of the “Corriere della sera” proposed by Luca Serianni: “We are together a family saga, which extends from the remote years of the Second World War up to the present-future embodied by the last born Mary; a cross-section of Italian history experienced by the many emigrants from the South to the North and the redemption from a humble condition to well-being, cultural rather than economic; but also a literary creation, marked by a tragic event, the death of the author’s little brother, Claudio, in 1967 ».