Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato).
SI grew up among the contradictions of our time and I’m a little addicted, I confess. I am no longer horrified if, among the images of a television report on children being starved in the Gaza Strip, a cheerful and crackling advertisement for a fried chicken or for a sensual pouring of hot chocolate bursts in cheerfully. But I still feel – fortunately – a jolt of embarrassment at being born in that part of the world where you can feast and celebrate.
Never before have injustices and inequalities stood out more than during the last Christmas holidays and I hope they made us reflect on the absurd world we helped build. It’s the uplifting commercials with choirs of children of all races singing blissfully in unison that strike me the most. If this is our imaginary ideal, how come we have sunk so low?
Wars hurt the heart but even though they are so close they have become something abstract and unreala scenario that seems irreversible to us, almost resigned to the horror. With difficulty, however, we lay our eyes inside our borders.
The last one Census report he gave us the photograph of an Italy that floats, does not sink and cannot be saved and there are those who fight every day always with water at their throats. It’s a great book to tell about it Niccolo Zancan, Anthology of the defeated. Almost poetic chronicle of the present (Einaudi): an anthology of short stories, pencil sketches that give us the stories of a humanity that lives on the margins of the much vaunted well-being.
“Anthology of the defeated. Almost poetic chronicle of the present” by Niccolò Zancan (Einaudi)
Humanity on the margins
A small catalog of characters who survive in the undertow of our coveted consumer society and they have often lost all hope for their future. There are those who have failed and are forced to return to live with their widowed father, sharing few crumbs of existence with the humble pensioner. The grandmother who can’t cope with her small pension and is forced to steal a sandwich from the supermarket to eat, becoming a journalistic case splashed across all the newspapers.
Men and women who through “an accident of life ended up in trouble” and slowly slipped into the darkest areas of society. Marginalized people who already know from the start that they will no longer climb that famous, now inaccessible social ladder. Delicate and never dramatic, and therefore even more touching, Zancan’s stories are for those who still feel like looking reality in the eye.
iO Donna © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED