THE“Fuliara” is a woman who lives alone with her cats, Use herbs to treat people from the country, and make their own facts. Her real name is a woman Lucia but they call it that “because she has fine and impalpable hair like the black soot of Etna, which in Sicilian is said to be” Fulinia “. Fuliara is a nickname but also a suggestion »he says Anna Chisari, journalist based in Milan, which chose it as the title of his second novel (Garzanti).
“She is a healer and not a witch, or one who knows the rhythms of nature and the secrets of the heart” adds. It is to her that Veneranda is entrusted, a girl, orphaned of mother, who soon becomes her heira daughter of soul to whom she teaches to distinguish the astragal from the saponaria, the wild fennel from the Etna rennet. But above all, good from evil.
Fuliara is the protagonist of the most feminine but also sweeter pages of the novel, because almost all the others are an intertwining of many family destinies sentenced to violence. We are in Belpasso, the Sicilian city of origin of the author, a mid -nineteenth century, and the characters are almost all looking for a less hard place in the world. By Michele Cutrona, who leaves his daughter pregnant for a rape in the convent as long as he gives birth to the child abandoned by his mother in the wheel of the church of the Madonna del Carmelo, in Catania, where he is cared for by the priest, up to Pietrangelo Balsamo called Artghiu, «A bad character even if he does not seem to have reasons to be, who does not evolvewhat I hate the most »specifies Chisari. Between hidden pregnancies, unhappy unions and families governed by men, the plot has a sliding style but above all a inlaid language From the Catania dialect who is “ironic, an crackling that resembles a continuous and profound lament”.
The Futia of Anna Chisari, Garzanti224 pages, € 17.80
It is a book where it seems there is no room for healthy relationships. How did it come?
The story is the prequel of my first novel (the wind of Etna, ed) but not only: I wanted to talk about a precise thing. That is, of the fact that some people live from unhappy without knowing that sometimes the cause of this unhappiness is in the history of their family, a story stained by damage that has left emotional brands. It’s called intergenerational trauma and I discovered it by chance.
What is this inherited stain?
The impact that traumatic experiences experienced by a generation can have on subsequent generations, even without the latter having suffered the same trauma. However, damage, from which you can redeem yourself. Just look for a new force within us to live a different story from the family one.
Anna Chisari, journalist and blogger, was born in Sicily and lives in Milan. His new novel is a prequel of the previous one, the Etna wind. (Photo: Diletta Toniolo)
Michele Cutrona is one who does not make one pass to his wife, and every now and then he settled some slaps and some football, even without reason, so as not to raise her the ridge and make her understand that in the house and outside the man was him … “. How did you know this male chauvinism?
It is that of the men of Sicily where I lived from the seventies to the nineties. I remember that when I passed through the main course of Belpasso there were always a dozen men who teamed you and made you feel an object. I felt a lot of shame. I also remember that my uncles and cousins were very assertive with their women who, out of jealousy, had been forced to leave their jobs before getting married and obeyed the males at home.
Today women are more autonomous but the theme of violence resists.
Once upon a time there was the violence of control, today there is that of those who have lost this power and cannot stand the new female reality.
In any case, violence also involves men in the book. Cateno, for example, is a boy who could have remained a simple hub embarked on a ship, instead he becomes a man prey to low instincts like the others.
Cateno becomes bad because he crosses human wickedness. It is the same thing that happened, days ago, in the prison of Marassi to an eighteen year old tortured and raped. As you can see, the eras change, men seem to improve, but certain things remain immutable. Hunger, thirst, sex and power. This novel follows the streets of the dark feelings that we cannot imagine but that belong to us.
Even Veneranda compared to the Futiara, it becomes at the end evil, that is, it exceeds the insurmountable border that separates the good from evil. He does it to “protect” his daughter Nunzia, a happy wife and mother …
It is the theme of toxic motherhood. I also see today mothers who do not allow the children to “be born” and children who remain for life in the maternal uterus. In the east wind I wrote that “a person was not born if he does not go away from his mother’s house”.
There are very bloody scenes. They represent the violence that rages in Genoa besieged by General Massena, the city where Cateno admits that for him it is indifferent that the armies of Napoleon or English arrives …
But he says it only out of ignorance! Cateno is like those who do not go to vote today because in the end nothing changes … and this is a truth that has to do with the inevitability of the war.
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