Cand we are almost forgotten about it. Almost. What year was it? What were you doing during lockdown? They are memories that we wanted to remove in the frenzy of returning to life, with the streets invaded by terraces full of steaming dishes and the clatter of trolleys of tourists who have started traveling again with the secret anxiety that confinement may return when you least expect it.
Some even deny the effectiveness of vaccines and unfortunately it is not a passer-by but the American Secretary of Health, who for a sort of historical twist is called Kennedy. The rules, the masks, the fear of touching one’s peers have been drowned in the room of oblivion.
But then comes literature which, like a sentinel of memory, brings forgotten feelings back to the surface. He does it with grace, fun and prose as smooth as a treadmill Sigrid NunezAmerican writer and author of Through life (2022) on which the film was based The next roomdirected by Pedro Almodóvar and winner of the Golden Lion at the eighty-first Venice Film Festival.
Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato).
This latest work for Garzanti is entitled The vulnerable and is set in Manhattan struggling with Covid but, as Nunez has accustomed us, every existential drama or tragedy is always told with a lightness that gives us irony, delicacy and comfort.
Vulnerable is the protagonist, as everyone over the age of 65 was called in that perioda writer who finds herself spending the lockdown period with a very specific task: to keep company with a parrot named Eureka of the Ara breed, a species that cannot tolerate abandonment and loneliness.
“The vulnerable” by Sigrid Nunez (Garzanti).
To fulfill this favor requested of you by a friend stuck in another state due to the pandemic, the writer moves into the parrot’s apartment and begins a bizarre coexistence which provides the inspiration for a current of thoughts and considerations, Nunez’s most appreciated figure.
However, the idyllic coexistence with the bird seems to be interrupted with the surprise arrival of a problematic and somewhat temperamental boyan unexpected event that will offer the opportunity to animate a generational challenge between two strangers in a time suspended in thin air.
But whatever the narrative dynamics, iThe pleasure of reading is all in Nunez’s extraordinary voice and in the messy and fascinating overlapping of his reflections on the essence of our lives and our vulnerability.
All articles by Serena Dandini.