Mariateresa Di Lascia's first novel is coming out posthumously. A southern story revealing an extraordinary talent.

SUMMARY. The introductory commentary and than R. La Capria's long article occupy the whole front page of the "Culture and Entertaiment " section of the paper. La Capria expresses his astonishment at the release of an extraordinary book, which seems too bring back the original sense of novel as a genre, even in its Nineteenth century meaning , along the lines traced two other great writers, Elsa Morante and Annamaria Ortese. La Capria differentiates in this novel the presence of two works, on one hand the "narration" and the deep and dramatic analysis of the internal experiences of a woman-child, the protagonist, and a true 'novel of the shadows" with a " tearing and violent originality of expression".

(CORRIERE DELLA SERA, February 22, 1995)

The author of "Passaggio in ombra" the discovery-novel which was recently published by Feltrinelli, died after a brief illness last September, at only forty years of age.

Mariateresa Di Lascia was born in Rocchetta Sant'Antonio, near Foggia, on January 3, 1954. She joined the Radical party in the early Eighties and was elected National vice-Secretary in 1982, when Pannella was Secretary. She was also elected representative to the Parliament in the ninth legislation.

She was particularly active on human rights and environmental issues, and participated in many demonstrations in Eastern European countries before the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. In Italy she coordinated the anti-nuclear campaign for the 1987 referendum. She was the founder of the "Hands off Cain" league for the abolition of capital punishment in the world. In 1993, together with Adriano Sofri she coordinated the campaign "I fast" in favor of war victims in the former Yugoslavia. In the meantime Mariateresa Di Lascia had also started to write, she completed "Passaggio in ombra' over a four year period, from 1988 to 1992. Immediately after she wrote four short stories, one of which "Compleanno" (Birthday) won the "Millelire" award, chosen by a jury composed of Gore Vidal, Angelo Guglielmi, Irene Bignardi, Gianluigi Melega, and Paolo Mauri. Last year shestarted working at a new novel "Le relazioni sentimentali" (Love relations), of which she left the first draft of the first chapters. In 1988, sh

e had finished another novel "La coda della lucertola" (The Lizard's Tail) but she decided not to publish it.

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Sometimes we run into a book that is astonishing and leaves us full of awe. It is a rare event, actually it happens increasingly less often, and thus, when it happens, we ask ourselves"where did this book come from?', we try to understand the reasons for its sudden appearence, and we try looking for possible ancestors and all possible kinships. But this book by Mariateresa Di Lascia, "Passaggio in ombra". seems like one of those cases that are so exceptional and unique that only a premature and cruel death, which fate had reserved to its still young author, could seal. This is a definitive book, where the whole curve of life plays itself out. and I could say, using the words of one of its characters, Mariateresa "this book is your song, this is your rebellion, is what remains of your aspirations. This book is you".

A book that was born of an experience of sorrow, one that was lived to the bitter end, to its extreme consequences, to the extremes of disease and annihilation. and this experience was understood to the bitter end, lucidly analyzed down to its most intimate structure, down to its most hidden fibre. Thus, this novel achieves a form "knowledge of the imagination", of the intellect that performs vivisection of the heart and the soul and takes over the mind. It is a form of knowledge that is more subtle and unpredictable than the one learned from studying or living, and requires a specific language to be expressed. Even while resembling common speech, like the one used by Di Lascia, it is a language made up of words, thoughts, joining of syntax and sensation, where the artist through a refined spirit and delicate instinct of choice - according to Wilde- understands life for us, and gives it a fleeting perfection". There are not many writers who draw from this kind of knowledge. In Italy only two writers h

ave done so, Elsa Morante ed Annamaria Ortese. I don't wish to exaggerate, but I have no problem now putting Mariateresa Di Lascia next to them. I recognize in her pages the same "marvelous egotism", the same passionate vibration, the same female energy, the same acquaintance with grief. It is not a matter of resemblance, because Morante's writing is lusher and Ortese's more literary, it is a question of quality and level of imagination.

While I was reading "Passaggio in ombra" I was thinking that today women are bringing a different gaze to Italian literature, perhaps a freer one, at any rate a more intense one on issues like the family, relations between family members, feelings, love relations, sorrow, waiting, realities that are seen with a new eye, a less conventional one.. Precisely like what happens to someone who has been silent for a long time and then finds himself/herself suddenly free to speak.

What is certain, is that with these three authors the novel was able to recover that sense of the narration that it was loosing, that desire and ability to narrate, that cadence, that way of leavening facts and characters little by little as they emerge, blending them into a fateful and unpredictable way, which I call the "novelist step". And one can hear this "novelist step" and a female re-awakening in DI Lascia's book as well. You can also hear that is novel is composed of two superimposed novels which sometimes are perfectly overlapping and sometimes diverge. One is a realistic novel, a bit old fashioned, Nineteen century style, one could say, and is the motor that makes the story move forward. The other is a novel of intellectual and visionary introspection, made of great meditations and that kind of knowledge of the imagination I spoke of before.

The first narrates - almost always from the point of view of young girl- the story of the relations with the father who has not yet "regularized his position", and with her very young beloved unwed mother, who wil wait invain, together with her daughter, under the curious gaze of the whole little town ( in Apulia) the arrival in church of the groom and father. But he doesn't come, he turns his back on the marriage and on paternity, more because his innate irresponsibility than for lack of love, more out of a sense of indifference "that does not allow to transform an intention into something real".

The girl then tells the story of her mother's death that came as a result of this cruel disappointment. In the second part of the book, the absolute and impossible love that is born in her, by now an adolescent, for a cousin, becomes the obsessive theme of the novel. But her cousin too, just like her father had done, will escape and abandon her at the decisive moment. This double abandonment will create in her a kind of disease, a slow collapse of the body and soul. It is with this dissolution, with this deterioration of everything that "Passaggio in ombra" begins. It is the voice of this hopeless survivor that tells the story. It is therefore a novel that unfolds in "a somewhat anarchistic" fashion, like hearing someone speak "about things that got stuck on the twigs of memory, and then mixed themselves up with others that were learned in a different way". It s never a straight line narration. Only this way, the narrator writes "I have been able to weave the fabric of my collapse".

Imagine what courage it took for this intrepid investigator to write her song and her rebellion, to make the silence that was in her turn into her words, to transform her virginity as a novelist and her literary inexperience into an extraordinary novel! She too must have feared (like she says of the mother) that the words "would turn against her", she too must have "held them in for a long time, hiding them away from everybody", she too must have had to " struggle under the blows of words that she did not know how to stand up to".

In the novel you always sense this struggle of a writer at her first duel with words, and you sense that no matter how high the price she paid, she came out fully victorious. A surprising result from a literary point of view.

This still young writer had the courage (finally) to create characters held in a fatal knot and then to untie this knot with a convincing and original analysis made with the knife of imagination. She had the courage of writing a novel that seems both natural and constructed at the same timer, whose construction, like that of crystals seems to stem from an unknown force.

She had the courage of inventing characters, mainly female characters, who like all those who are humiliated and wounded have no other special gifts but a depth of feeling and affections which seems to redeem ignorance and awe, and even "stupidity" bestowing a form of superior intelligence.

She had the courage of setting the story in a small town in the South, in Apulia, without ever "characterizing" it, without ever making the reader feel the heaviness (even literary heaviness) of the South. And finally she had the courage of having a great part of her own story told by a young girl who knows and sees many things, in her way, but in a way that is articulated and complex like that of an adult. Her "angelic abstraction" has to do with an instinctual rejection of reality, and with a world 'in which things cease being tied together", a single possible world 'in comparison to which all other worlds, both those she dreamed and those that frightened her, would disappear like clouds swept away by the wind, like weak ghosts, and where you had "the freedom to have no shape".

But this is not the only novel making up "Passaggio in ombra" Superimposed and interwoven with this one is another novel -as I said previously- a novel in the shade, which has the visionary strenght of a Morante or an Ortese, but also an intrepid, precise, unmistakable voice which is only her own, that of Mariateresa Di Lascia.

This second novel is presided over by a mystery hidden a curtain of silence, and even the writing, in spite of the excess of imagination and perhaps just to keep it under control, becomes dense and lucid. It acquires a tearing, violent originality of expression, especially where it investigates disease and distress and the deepest causes of the evil of living. This novel comes out of this imaginative, pitiless and proud speculation "where the past becomes embodied in the imagination of dreams and crosses the boundless region of salvation".

It is, in fact, a book that wants to cross that "boundless region" making its way through the abyss of an unspeakable sorrow which has been explored to its roots, down to its DNA spiral.

"I wrote this novel", the author said before dying, " in order to be loved by whoever will read it".