“Grande Meraviglia” by Viola Ardone, the candid gaze of a little girl

Lto Great Wonder by Viola Ardone. We’re inside the rooms of a mental hospital and here is Elba, a fifteen year old girl named after the river that crosses Germany, his mother’s land. Elba calls it “half-world” because it is a place that “is not exactly the end of the world” but only where the crazy people (people like us, from outside) lock up the crazy ones, those who are annoying because they are ugly, bad and poor (yes, the rich end up in the clinic, among their comforts).

However, Elba had to pretend to be crazy to return to this half-world where he lived with his Mutti (that’s what she calls her mother, in German) until the day she was taken away for being locked up by the Big Butt Nuns (aka: the orphanage). Now the doctors want to convince her that she is no longer there but Elba doesn’t believe it, she knows that Mutti is hidden in the Torre delle Agitate (one of the three departments) and we believe her.

In fact, let’s do something else: through his point of view we explore the universe of mental illness in the days preceding the entry into force of the Basaglia Law where Fausto Meraviglia also appears among patients and nurses, the young doctor co-protagonist (in the title) of Great Wonder (Einaudi), Viola Ardone’s latest novel that moves us with a smile on our lipsa musical language, a mix of themes (non-biological fatherhood, madness, love) and a style that adheres to the meaning of the work.

Viola Ardone and the freedom of madness

It’s the style of freedom, that’s it. Pirandello had warned us (the madman is the truly free) but here Elba becomes the bearer with his spontaneity of thought and his hypnotizing verbal rhymes: the result is that this freedom overwhelms everyone. «It was the feeling I wanted the reader to get» says Ardone. «I placed myself in the most restrictive place in the world to leave Elba possibility of finding his freedom through the use of language, talking about ourselves and discoveringin the end, that we are not so different. Compared to crazy people, we just have to hide itmadness”.

Freedom is the common thread not only of mental illness but of the entire novel.
Yes, the doctor Meraviglia for example is a fervent supporter of libertarian ideas who in the end discovers how much it costs to accept the freedom of his children. In addition to that of patients not wanting to get well.

Then there’s Elba who writes down in a black notebook all the illnesses of others, or words that end in -ia, like madness, and he does it to find out about his own, since “knowing is already a bit of healing”, he says. Words are important.
Freud said that psychoanalysis is talk therapy. And Basaglia was the first to understand that the words of madmen are bearers of meaning, and therefore worthy of being listened to: this was his great revolution.

45 years have passed since then and yet nothing else has been done.
It’s amazing, yes. It was a hastily passed law that not even Basaglia, who died two years later, was entirely happy with. Someone should have continued to work there and instead they are there immobile while the structures today are overcrowded and families are abandoned to the solitary care of sick relatives. My book is an invitation to think about the legacy of that law.

In reality there are other legacies: the widespread idea about the madness of women, for example. “Women’s brains are smaller than men’s and fire more easily,” says Elba.
Yes, I studied a lot and I discovered that within the mental hospital injustice there was female injustice. The facilities were full of women interned for being irregular or heretical, and ultimately denounced as crazy. Then, in there, you really went crazy like what happened to Mutti who when she entered she was fine.

What is the relationship between Mutti and Elba?
A healthy relationship. The very strong co-presence during childhood was the basis of the teachings internalized by the daughter. Her confirmation is that Elba will never believe that her mother is dead. In the meantime, however, she has given herself some funny rules, as do all those who live in places where she is deprived of control of her own time because everything is already established. Even the father does it – Roberto Benigni in Life is Beautiful when she tries to make the concentration camp normal for her son by establishing rules. Childhood, after all, has the wonderful ability to survive even in the worst places thanks to the instinct to play.

And here Elba plays with the refrains of advertising.
Yes, TV is the only form of contact with the world for these patients and for her, from a form of entertainment, it almost becomes a law of life. It’s reassuring.

It reads: “You have to study so you don’t go crazy.” In other words: no one saves themselves. And someone succeeds with books.
Studying for me is a natural anti-depressant and writing is a way to be in the world. I always say this to my students too: take a sheet of paper or a blank page on your phone and write, in the end you objectify what you think and you feel better.

Does it also work with love? Or what “sometimes happens to you, but other times decapitates you: it makes you lose your mind”?
Not always. Meraviglia discovers that love is somehow independent of what we do to deserve it. He knows he hasn’t been a good husband or a good father and yet everyone loves him. So why should love be a form of madness? No, and the reason is simple: love is not a double entry and that of others does not depend only on us. If anything, love is a great form of freedom, too: it doesn’t matter if you are ugly, unsuccessful and not very fashionable. Someone will love you.

«We crazy plants are plants with visible roots, everything underneath can be seen from the outside». Reading this book almost makes you want to go a little crazy.
Maybe a little more free, right?

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