A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: Books. Rocchesante, a Sican saga (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Irene Chias returns to surprise us with this latest novel, Rocchesante 
(Laurana, 2023), in which we find the style of the cultured, attentive, 
direct, merciless but also delicate narrator. ---- Rocchesante is a 
sophisticated Spoon River in Sicilian style, in which dozens of 
characters are portrayed with a high introspective sense and a subtle 
streak of humour, starting from the genealogical books and their plots, 
as only in small and very small towns it can happen when the circularity 
of relationships imposes couplings that are not always voluntary and 
spontaneous with rare flashes of true love. The result is a composition 
of hilarious little pictures, of biographies with the most diverse 
facets: psychologically twisted, or banally obvious, tenaciously 
resistant, or surprisingly outside the lines.

We discover Rocchesante's characters as children and students, we follow 
them as they grow up, and then, many pages later, we find them adults or 
old people, related to each other, at the center of curious, strange, or 
even insignificant and simply monotonous events. A skein of a thousand 
colors and many knots, which grows from page to page and from chapter to 
chapter, so that if you are not careful, it can happen that you are 
forced to go back in search of the common thread lost within the many 
stories in the story.

Chias is a skilled architect, no doubt about it; her direction, her 
editing, her weaving, is fine and complicated but compelling, full of 
scientific ideas too, like when she indulges in talking about snakes or 
lizards or turtles or botany. The Sicilian types that she paints can be, 
indeed they certainly are, characters that we have met in our history 
and in our lives, prototypes that we know and in whose vices and tics we 
perhaps recognize ourselves.

The book describes bunches of vines enclosed in the microcosm of a 
Sicilian village, apparently invented, but in which we recognize the 
villages perched on those Sican mountains so dear to the writer; a 
village divided into three island neighborhoods. With witty brushstrokes 
Irene Chias gives us the bad habits, the special characteristics, the 
pettiness or the virtues of figures all in some way connected to the 
experience of the narrating ego, an ego that retains a memory, an 
anecdote, of each figure or figure, an experience skilfully 
reconstructed, with retrospections that reveal to us what we did not 
understand, or could not understand, at first glance.

The pages dedicated to the catechism and the period of Father Pippo's 
religious lessons are particularly successful; a small treatise on 
atheism and materialism explained by a little girl with very subtle 
irony. As well as the chapter entitled "The menarche", which describes 
the experience at the classical high school with a "minchia unciata" 
principal, who didn't want to know about signing the authorization to 
leave early for a gynecological examination due to the delay of the 
arrival of menstruation. Hilarious pages imbued with hints, signs, names 
that we will find and understand better in the final chapters, according 
to the intelligent screenplay that characterizes the entire volume.

The pages of the "animalist" dream are beautiful, in which a tribunal of 
animals judges men guilty of cruelty towards them, a sort of law of 
retaliation of revenge and justice, with understanding and clemency for 
those (like the Inuit) who hunted only for need.

And then, almost 150 pages after having immersed ourselves in this 
Roccasante encyclopedia, here is the return of the headmaster in one 
piece, in reality... a piece of shit, who behind his rigidity hid an 
interest in the enlistment of agratis teachers in the son's private 
school (a diploma mill for dad's children), with only the compensation 
of the score and the fees paid by unfortunate new graduates. Here the 
author's fine irony skewers the inflated balloon with frank words.

We cannot mention the ending, which we slowly saw materialize, leaving 
us surprised and full of questions about the, so to speak, metaphysical 
choice. Let's not add anything else, the book must be savored, savored, 
and in the end appreciated - at least I appreciated it - for the 
frankness and narrative ability, the inventiveness and the strategy 
adopted by the author in making us penetrate into the profound soul of a 
Sicily which, despite everything, re-exists.

Pippo Gurrieri

http://sicilialibertaria.it
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