“We made snowmen with the snow, pulled it or glided over it with the sled, just outside the village, where there were the steepest descents. It was part of our life, a bit like the mountains, the Piave and the woods. You couldn’t help but love the snow, but sometimes you hated it ”.
“Forever, elsewhere”, the first work of the writer Barbara Cagni, is in this quotation mark. There is a sense of a simple and optimistic Italy which, despite everything, tries to move forward by writing a better future than the past, between reconstruction and the search for identity which means “modernity”.
Alto Cadore
In Alto Cadore, a place to live in post-World War II Italy is not always easy, a group of strong and courageous women becomes the symbol of a reality that oscillates between great pain and simplicity. In this novel, the drama of forced emigration and nostalgia for the places of birth become a metaphor for an illusory pursuit of happiness. The small mountain village in the Belluno area in which Barbara Cagni sets this story is, therefore, the starting point of an existential journey in which the only way to survive is to leave. But, instead of finding the promised paradise, one ends up falling into a limbo in which one oscillates between nostalgia and the impossibility of fully integrating into the new homeland. Which, in reality, is a sort of permanent and ineluctable discomfort, a new suffering – which is more like a desperate and paradoxical escape route – and which takes the name of mental illness.
Berta
It is the story of Berta, sister of the narrator of the story, a girl who is not yet twenty – after a love disappointment that deeply marked her, making her fragile – tries to get out of her solitude by emigrating to a country in Switzerland. But here, in a closed and hostile context towards “strangers”, she ends up being overwhelmed by her own pain which turns into authentic “living sickness”. In time, she will be able to find a little comfort and a little hope only in the kindness of her mother, sister and other women who are part of the experience of her home. The protagonists of the everyday life of that village. Those good feelings and the courage of solidarity will be the engine of history. The mother of the protagonist and the friends who gravitate around her house feed the hope for a better future. And, in some way, the fate of those who left and those who remained are intertwined, giving life to a bitter story where to move forward one must necessarily stay together.
“Forever, elsewhere”, Barbara Cagni, Fazi Editore, 250 pages, 17 euros