POZZO VALE PIU' DEL TEMPO

Dalia, eight years old, after an accident spends many days in a hospital that is not a hospital because the world is no longer the world; she is discharged, returns home, the house is empty, probably everyone is dead. Dalia, during the days of hospitalization, meets two children who have also had an accident: the drowsy child who cannot speak and Morena, who does not move well, but can write. After leaving the hospital, Dalia will not know anything about those children for a long time. Without family, without money and without a home, Dalia is taken in by the old Fioranna, who was a teacher, knows how to teach and knows how to defend herself. Fioranna teaches Dalia two things: that the world as humans have known it still exists but is hidden in the mountains, and how to bury a body. So Dalia, from the valley tyrannized by the Boscarato family, the masters as always - because the world is no longer the same, but whoever is master remains such -, ascends the mountain and arrives at the Village of Wells. Knowing how to care for and bury, Dalia knows how to treat living and dead bodies, even non-human ones. This is how she becomes the assistant of the butcher Biagio and the companion of the eccentric Orsola. If in the hospital, as a child, Dalia's companions were the sleepy boy and the little girl with the pen, in her adulthood they are precisely them: Biagio, the grumpy butcher persecuted by a white cat, and Orsola, the woman of stories, who lives alone in an abandoned hotel where, as everywhere now, a crime has been committed. The temperature of the world fluctuates around fifty degrees, crops are struggling, livestock are dying, in the mountains there is water but no weapons or medicines, in the plains there are both weapons and medicines, but there is neither water nor food. It is natural that the Boscaratos, as their masters always do, try to eat up all the resources. But when the outside temperature is so high, human capital is the only resource left, and eating no longer has such a metaphorical meaning. If Agota Kristof, in The City of K. Trilogy, wrote that one is truly capable of killing when one kills something that should not be eaten, if Cormac McCarthy, in The Road, described human beings who are food reserves for other human beings, Ginevra Lamberti narrates how mass production changes the story of the man who eats the man. In a powerful novel, for writing and imagination, in which tenderness is first of all an abyss, or rather a ditch, in which prostitutes sell the gestures and words of care and not those of seduction – if there is a difference –, and where the Veneto is a Far West and Venice has stopped being a fish because the lagoon no longer exists, Ginevra Lamberti establishes the mythology of climate change, of respect for the dead without worship,of legends that repeat themselves the same and curse according to ever new curses because the sins are ever new; it founds the mythology of love that after having made the sun and the other stars move, for centuries, now makes them implode.