“THE Russian missiles in the summer of 2023 hit a pizzeria in Kramatorsk, killing Victoria Amelina at just thirty -seven years old. This is his voice: fresh, alive, intense, as if she was here now to talk to us ». It ends like this Margaret Atwood’s prefaceamong the most famous author in the world (his The story of the ancella), to the posthumous book of a Ukrainian writer who-after the Russian invasion-had turned into a reporter-activistcommitted to documenting war crimes for the organization Truth Hounds.
A hunter, painful and yet always on, of truth. “An angel with the register”, as Atwood herself tells it By combining it with a figure present in many religions: the emissary of the goddess who collects the traces of the good and bad actions, intended for opposing dishes on the final balance.
From the end of February 2022 to July of the following year, Victoria – who was Vika for everyone, for his family and friends as for journalists who asked for their guide – He tried. To change in an investigator. And to reinvent himself mother for an 11 -year -old boy. This of his advances between the stones, along the streets of Ukraine bombed and along those of resistant humanity, is now kept in Looking at women looking at the war (for the publisher Guanda).
Barbara Stefanelli (photo by Carlo Vangeri Gilbert).
An unfinished book, which was published as it was interrupted by Vika: today he offers himself without regulating our reading and yet – as he suggested Paolo Giordano on Corriere della Sera – The book will remain on this conflict. Even in decades, when many other texts will be offered to reconstruct and understand.
“Looking at women to look at the war” by Victoria Amelina (Guanda).
There is a detail that returns the sense of how a war, every war, creates a moat between the life that flowed before and the life that falls after. Amelina, in Egypt with her son that night of February 24, 2022, manages to reach her home in Kiev after a trip of canceled flights and ground kilometers through the European est.
In the pantry he finds “the biscuits bought on the eve of the invasion”, he takes them and tastes them. He comments on his book-diary that “have not yet gone badly”. They let themselves be eaten, they return continuity to that apartment that has become a non -place, a dull space.
“Bread del Bosco” by Chandra Candiani (Einaudi 2023).
It is the same effect that a young Palestinian mother describes, returned in the days of the truce in Gazawhen the door of the children’s room reopens and sees the drawings left in half on the table, the markers scattered around. Or the image of the stables burned in the Kibbutz of Nir Oz, on the south border of Israel, where a quarter of the 400 inhabitants was kidnapped or massacred on October 7, 2023: the gate of the enclosure of the horses that bangs on the void remains.
Chandra Candianiin his poetry Wood bread (Einaudi 2023), reflects and says that “no war is far away”, that everywhere “the dead fly low with explained/invisible and present sleeves/night animals of spring/who does everything to show themselves discreet”.
Will the details – the biscuits in the kitchen, the designs awaiting the colors, the gate that creases – to tear us to indifference for each war in our wetsuit spring 2025?
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All articles by Barbara Stefanelli
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