Un Hollywood saying advises actors and directors against making films where the cast includes dogs or children, considered a calamity on every set. THEIn literature there are no such stringent rules but there is a certain diffidence in tackling books with animals as protagonists and a difficulty for authors in writing sex scenes: even the most experienced literary talents can fall into sexual intercourse and a description that is intended to be full of eroticism easily turns into something ridiculous and awkward.
Really the literary festival LINEN dedicate an evening to reading the worst sex scenes in books of all time: an exhilarating and successful event. But there is a novel that has just been released in which the writer with great skill manages to dispel all these prejudices.
In Yesterday’s joy (Einaudi), latest work by Elena Stancanelli, the protagonist is Anna, a woman who has passed forty and the end of a love, challenging loneliness together with a host of friends and the company of Mina, the beloved setter whose “love” adventures we follow with the dog Frodoan unaware male like human ones, who however offers the writer the possibility of creating a funny and original, but no less profound, watershed in Anna’s life.
Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato).
The novel is lively and ironic, expertly constructed through rhythmic and always credible dialoguesas are the characters in the dense forest of bonds in which the protagonist manages to extricate herself, facing the difficulties of growing up which for a woman “at a certain age” seem irreversible.
“The joy of yesterday” by Elena Stancanelli (Einaudi).
The image of post-menopausal females struggling like whales to avoid ending up stranded in the land of oblivion is explosive and raises a thousand questions: What happens to desire when the years begin to accumulate? Can you live alone without suffering? Is the couple the only answer to daily discomfort or a suffocating cage? What is friendship?
Definitely for Anna the bond with Micol, a younger and special friend, is a source of joy and curiosity as well as the relationship with “others” (which in addition to friends also includes dogs and lovers…), is one of the reasons why existence, in the end, despite the low blows to which we are all exposed, is still the best thing that has happened to us.
The network of affections outside the canonical laws of the traditional family will perhaps save us more than beauty. The only way to love yourself is to take care of others and accept them with their thousand defects, including dogs who are capable of communicating powerful messages even if they don’t speak.
All articles by Serena Dandini.
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