To escape from a restrictive domestic life – an authoritarian father who punishes her by locking her in the “room of silence” and a mother who lives only in the adoration of her two sons and the cult of a mysterious ceramic Baby Jesus – Sofia seeks love elsewhere and directs it, since childhood, to a strange “creature” who frequents her family with her parents. Beyond gender and every convention, together they live euphoric and happy hours: those of the escapes at dawn to reach Marechiaro and huddle together on the way back in the smell of seaweed, rocks, and rocks bathed by the sea; those of the crazy games in the Kingdom, the room with pink furniture: there they dance among clouds of talcum powder, they are a King and a Queen in their very personal Paradise, they touch and caress each other’s skin until it becomes smooth as that of statues, they desire each other, they breathe in a carnal breath, they put on makeup, they dress up, they tear and exchange each other’s hearts, they invoke the freedom to be able to sin. Everything is possible in that circle-world where there is no law or identity, the world of celebration where ordinary time is cancelled out, creation in its purest state. At least until one day, as in the cruelest of fairy tales, someone puts an end to that harmony by brutally separating them, interrupting an unspeakable game that has to do with the birth of a celestial child. The spell of imagination is broken. Sofia falls into reality, destined for a life far from Naples and an arranged marriage, but all this does not belong to her, the pain is unbearable and so she leaves Milan to return to Naples to do the work that is her vocation – the care of the bodies of the deceased -, in the exasperated and selfish search for the “creature” of which she has lost track, in a world of violent loves and tributes of love. A revolutionary novel by Simona Pedicini, set in a Naples that no modernity will ever be able to scratch. (Source: Ibs.it)
she is an Italian writer, specialized in thanatoaesthetics
