SUMMARY: A biographical introduction and some information about her work, as well as two previouis articles by Adriano Sofri and Oreste Pivetta-were published on page 5 of the supplement to "Unitê 2" which was entirely devoted to a presentation of Mariateresa Di Lascia's novel which has just been released in the bookstrores by Feltrinelli. Sofri develops a long comparison between Di Lascia's "very beautiful" novel and Elsa Morante's "Menzogna e sortilegio", the affinities between the two are emphasized by Sofri, who in no way sees this as an undermining of the originality of Maria Teresa Di Lascia's work. Sofri points out how in the novel the protagonists, or rather the female protagonists ("Giuseppina, Peppina, Anita, Chiara, ecc.) have a "closed", "sealed" destiny unfolding outside, or below, History, as is also the case in Morante's novel.

In his turn, Oreste Pivetta warns readers that this a "difficult" book, one thatdoes not console, is not accomodating, has no ornamentation, landscape descriptions or other resources are not used to attract or win over the reader.

(L'Unitê, February 27, 1995)

Feltrinelli has just released Maria Teresa Di Lascia's "Passaggio in ombra" (226 pages, 26,000 Lira) in the bookstores, the novel that will be reviewed in these pages by Adriano sofri and Oreste Pivetta.

Maria Teresa Di Lascia was born in Rocchetta Sant'Antonio near Foggia on January 3, 1954. She became an activist in the Radical Party and in 1982 became national vice-secretary (and was elected to Parliament in the 9th legislative session). She founded the league "Hands off Cain:" against capital punishment and promoted the campaigh "I fast" in favor of war victims in the former Yugoslavia.

In the years between 1988 and 1992 she wrote "Passaggio in ombra". Immediately after that she wrote four short stories, one of which, titled "Compleanno" , won the "Millelire" award. Last year she had started a new novel, "Le relazioni sentimentli" (Love relations) which was left unfinished. She had written another novel "La coda della lucertola" (The Lizard's Tail) which she decided not to publish.

ONE DIMENSIONAL WOMEN

by Adriano sofri

A few days ago, in via Ripetta, in Rome, there was a public presentation of a book. I was among those presenting it. I arrived early in Rome, walked around and I passed by via dell'Oca, where Elsa Morante used to live. Via Ripetta is very close. The article I wish I could write would start like this: In a spring like, mid-february afternoon, the elderly writer Elsa Morante put on a colorful shawl and went out, something she does rarely, to go and hear the presentation of a book, something she never does.. The book is entitled "Passaggio in ombra", the author is named Maria Teresa di Lascia and is forty years old. Someone told Elsa that fifty years after her own novel had been published, a woman had written a novel that was beautiful and strong like "Menzogna e sortilegio". Elsa gruff yet hopeful, read it and that is why she went looking for a place to sit in via Ripetta, up towards the front so that she could see the writer in the face. The famous writer absorbed in a semi-sleeping state the speeche

s of the presenters, who often used her name, until her gaze met that of Maria Teresa Di Lascia, which seemed calm yet a bit anxious. So she flashed her the smile of a sorceress who was herself a bit under a spell. Maria Teresa smiled to her in turn...."

This is not the way things went, as you well know. Elsa Morante died something like ten years ago. Maria Teresa Di Lascia died last year, without seeing her beautiful novel published.

In her novel, people have destinies that are closed, sealed in a single character, a single event. Giuseppina becomes pregnant when she is just a bit older than a child, and her life will always be defined by this hidden and denied baby. .Peppina is defined by her domestic megalomania and the mad confinement of her niece (grandaughter?). Anita lives for her daughter Chiara and for a very brief love very similar to compassion, which is revived when Francesco is unjustly sent to jail, and irremediably humiliated when Francesco abandons her at the altar. The child Chiara is both spectator and witness of the destiny of a blood-line. She is able to remove herself from it once, as an adolescent, (you have the impression that it is the first time she leaves home by herself without her dear women, without her nanny Rosina, her mother Anita, her aunt Giuppina and her father Francesco) as for a bold adventure. Her love for her cousin, the redemption of the "bastards", the fulfillment of something that has been s

mothered for centuries. But it is only a misunderstanding. Like the dove that was sent out to look for greenery after the Flood did not find it and came back, Chiara erases herself and bundles up, she looses blood and sex. She rejects her womanly identity and also her mother's fate, athe fate of a woman who had tried to find herself in her work as a mid-wife before being psychologically wounded to death. Chiara , the eternal child, stays on as the guest of the things to which one is accostumed and of the memories of those who have passed away. The fates of the male characters are often hateful, always poor. In the fates of women -the lives that really count- you always find an episode, an encounter, a passion, a tragedy and then a "never again". There is no History. Mariateresa's book does not need it. The stories of her women are sufficient onto themselves. History was also missing in Morante's novel "Menzogna e sortilegio", which was written during and after the war. Much later, Morante juxtap

osed History to people's life stories and blamed the former for the ruin of the latter. Then in her novel "Aracoeli" you could see that she stopped right at the edge of the of a sorrow without remedy. Because of Mariateresa's being a public and political person, one is particularly struck by the novel's dismissing of History. Mariateresa Di Lascia herself was even elected a representative -a miracle of the Radical Party- and was untiringly devoted to taking care of others. In her novel itself, the agricultural consortium and its secretary as well as the intrigues and justice ion the aftermath of the war play a role.. But it is the little stage of ancient and fateful stories of blood, "race", violated modesty and wounded "bastards" that runs through the novel. This ancient quality, this very long duration in time, is one of the answers to the question: how is it possible that a book that is comparable to "Menzogna e sortilegio", with a comparable setting, plot, and even style, can be written fifty ye

ars later and yet not be a smothered epigone but rather shine of its own light?

Elsa Morante has been quoted even to excess in these years. Justifyably so as the sorceress continues to make her presence felt. One day, a few years after her death, Lucia, her faithful friend, her "sea bird', having been asked whether she needed anything, said no, that she was rich:: "I just got the money from Elsa's sorcery".. She was referring to the copywrite money of some foreign translation of "Menzogna e sortilegio" (Lies and sorceries) Elsa's sorcery. When I told Mariateresa that her novel contained episodes that reminded me of Elsa's biography she told me that she didn't know anything about it. But the comparison with "Menzogna e sortilegio" is obligatory, as can be easily noted by any reader who has an ear for literature. When I wrote her about the book which was unpublished at that time, I had not yet seen a note that her partner Sergio later gave me. There Mariateresa had written: "Donna Peppina Curatore: Aunt Peppinella, the magician and the plot of "Menzogna e sortilegio" (remember

I like it more than living ? Chiara)" The comparison starts to be apparent right from the first lines of the novel. In both books the narrator is a woman and a female character in the novel (for Elsa , if I am not mistaken, this is the only time she writes a novel in the first person, until "Aracoeli" where, almost as an affront, the first person narrator is a male) Both are "the last of three generations". The two books begin from the end "from the point they are all dead".

Mariateresa: "The house where I have remained, after everyone left, is finally silent..." Many have tried to convince me to leave this house because it is small and suffocating..." Elsa "It is now two months that my adopted mother, my only friend and protectress, died...". "No one comes anymore to this small apartment, I am the only one left here". Mariateresa "The shabby clothes that cover my body". Elsa: "...bundled up in my usual reddish dress...".

Mariateresa: "When donna Peppina, who had loved me more than anything else in the world... I was twelve years old". Elsa: "my second mother, the only who was willing to give me praise, and even to think I was beautiful... the day she saw me come in for the first time, as a ten yeare old child".

Mariateresa "The ungainly creatuire who is approaching me from the mirror ...is me. I am astonished by the consistency of my flesh and the confusing shape of my attire..." Elsa:: My reflection springs a surprise attack on me; I am startled... then I recognize myself, I remain motionless staring at myself".

At beginning of Elsa's novel, Elisa, like Chiara, is: " made sensitive and morbid by extraordinary emotions". She has a companion: "Memory...Not only 'my' past and particularly my childhood...but also 'their' past, that of my father and my mother and my defunct family".

Chiara lives off a similar type of memory after her brief escape towards real life failed,. Memory has become almost a screen of her personal, real remembrances and those of others.

There are other similar points: women and the South, the love for her cousin, the imaginary disease of Elisa's family tree, the "blood" of the D'auria's. Even the names -the parents, Anna and Francesco in "Menzogna e sortilegio", Anita and Francesco in "Passaggio in ombra". There is a reference, a greeting. and the strongest of similarities appears to be the language. The affinity between the language of the two novels is very strong and is related to two essential qualities: the use of a woman's language, the one that mothers, nannies and grandmothers use with their granddaughters and the granddaughters with them. The style is regal, learned but not doctrinaire, one that doesn't care about other people's opinion. As far as Mariateresa is concerned, I have direct experience of this, in relation to previous drafts of this work, the ease with which she agreed to make certain corrections and her stubborn refusal to accept others. An effortless and bold mastery over her own writing. But that luxuriant and

lush writing that was typical of Elsa in "Menzogna e sortilegio" and was described as a "Morantian Baroque", that kind of language is extraneous to Mariateresa. Her language is not a stranger to force and excitement, nor to the magic of words said or left unsaid. But the wind that blew on Elsa sentences and lifted them on high, forcing her sometimes to make poetic intermezzoes, to dig up old lullabies and make up her own songs, in Mariateresa is instead like a kite on a short line, held tight in hand, and immediately called back to the ground. In Mariateresa's narration, the language needs to close into itself at the end of each chapter, becoming laconic and dry, like a lid that is put back on or a door that is closed. "Menzogna e sortilegio" too has many closed houses, claustrophilia and monastery like internment; but here, instead, the little girl moves between one house and the other, both of which are secret and not truly hers. To venture ouside, beyond town , on the train and on to the next town

is the seal of perdition. Chiara comes back lifeless from it. In that episode language changes and so does time. Clara is talking about herself and a self that acts. But in spite of her excited effort which ultimately a ruinous one, she is more distant than ever, seen more from the outside than any other episode. In other places the girl had been seen with the eyes of the other women. This takes away any complacency and affectation from the description of the self, her beauty, her promise, and makes them instead bitter and full of pity.

The scandal that Elsa will later describe, mainly through Giuseppe in "La Storia", when she will no longer hide her motherly gaze, is the scandal that befalls children and animal-like creatures-- Bella or Ida. The scandal against which Chiara can oppose no resistance, and from which she protects herself with a great illness, her eyes closing and slumber invading her, then with her chocking seizures and finally the disease that ruins her is her own. The scandal of a little girl who no longer accepts life, a girl who saw rabbits killed in that way, who saw the young boy Saverio mistreated without complaint, who saw her father's glance as he stood handcuffed, who saw Anita betrayed as she stood at the altar and then humiliated in her search, and finally saw her die. The excess of passion in the Elisa of "Menzogna e sortilegio" and the final epistular delirium (as a writer) is very far from Chiara, and this also marks the greater distance between the two languages. Chiara's memory and writing match the numbi

ng of her own life that is moving towards death. Death, in fact, the dance between Memory and Future closes the book in a moving manner.

Even if only in the imagination of us living, there must be a place in which Elsa Morante smiled to Mariateresa Di Lascia and she to her.

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A DIALOGUE WITH THE EFFORT OF LIVING

by Oreste Pivetta

"The house where I stayed on, after everyone left, is finally silent..." narrates Chiara going back to the faces and the places of her story and other stories close to hers, and really our own story as it touches on life and death, the meaning of existence and reason for its termination: " ... I drag mystelf, lazy and dusty ,with my old clothes on, while the boxes perched on the walls are bursting with rags I picked up on the sweaty flea markets on Fridays " After the first few lines in the first page which are written in the present , Mariateresa Di Lascia can start writing about her blonde hair, about her father Francesco, of Anita, of Aunt Peppina, of a town that is known to be in Apulia and lets itself be discretely imagined alive among countryside and hills, even if barely referred to, like light brush strokes of a painting giving more impressions than perspectives and details. But what you hear flowing in her writing is a deep soul engaging in a dialogue with the essence of things, while voice resona

te in the light of the world running after and decyphering common, familiar moments that her writing makes memorable. For this reason "Passaggio in ombra" is a very original novel, a difficult, unaccomodating book, that is read with the internal effort of important, serious things, even with some suffering because it gives back pieces of "truth" when everything around instead is running on mystification, hiding, falsity. And this happens precisely when feelings become the main subject.

Mariateresa Di Lascia finished writing "Passaggio in ombra" in 1992 and handed it to the publisher who decided to publish it soon. Mariateresa died last September. She was forty years old. She believed in this book and was anxious to see it. But that did not happen. But at least no one will be able to complain of publishers who are not careful enough and let many of its possible authors slip away. Readers, critics or the public could have been distracted. Perhaps this will not be the case. La Capria wrote that this novel "achieves a form of knowledge of the imagination, of the intellect that performs a vivisection of the heart and the soul and takes over the mind, a form of knowledge that is more subtle and unpredictable than the one that is learned by studying or life...", like only two other writers have been able to do in Italy, that is Elsa Morante and Annamaria Ortese. It is true that Italian fiction, whose death or crisis is often heralded, often comes up with one of these works, which have

an "ancient" intensity and manner in juxtaposition to the vacuity and artificial character of a lot, not all, of our "modern" production. The characters, dialogues, the sunny and harsh countryside that can be caught sight of (never with any emphasis, though)_ make up a story that is a sum of stories, among which one can find a public, social, collective story of this Italy, together with other stories of parents and children, of friends and relatives. Everyone gives his/her own meaning to life which is composed of ambitions, plans, frustrations, sorrows, envy, weaknesses, and other thinghs yet. The stories are a frame and at the same time its axis. In the middle of it grow intimate, personal feelings and knowledge which only a pain that has been experienced to the hilt can produce. We do not know her personal biography (aside from her political life) and maybe it has nothing to do with book. What counts is the gaze that adapts itself to discerning what is natural around us, to discerning that suspend

ed, disillusioned and indifferent normalcy that writes the code of a life, at the bottom of which one can surrender to a smile for consolation.