SUMMARY. Like the "Corriere della Sera" and "L'Unitê", the Neapolitan daily devotes the whole front page of the cultural section to Maria teresa Di Lascia's novel. According to Fofi, the writer, who chose very high level "mothers", like Morante and Ortese, wrote an extraordinary "portrait of Southern society and of a Southern family". He expresses his regret for the loss of such a high and valuable talent. Generoso Picone remembers the figure of Di Lascia and quotes some statements, among which those of Emma Bonino, who remembers the "visionary' and "poetic" character of her comrade in radical struggles.

(The "Culture and Society" page is almost entirely devoted to Mariateresa Di Lascia and her novel. At the center of the page there is a splendid and evocative picture of Mariateresa's face, deep in thought, next to the faces of Elsa Morante and Anna Maria Ortese).

(IL MATTINO, March 3, 1993)

Mariateresa Di Lascia's book is being released just a few months after her death. It is already being compared to the work of Ortese and Morante.

Mariateresa Di Lascia's novel, "Passaggio in ombra" celebrates "the enchanted rituals of MEMORY and FUTURE" as they were experienced in the golden age of life, in the fairy tales told in childhood and adolescence. It narrates their periodic exchanging of clothes, and TIME, which is their downfall. She celebrates and narrates with a magnificent prose, with a perfect mastery of scansion and symmetry, with the wisdom of a first class narrator who has read and assimilated the most difficult models. They are the ones of our literary production from the feminine line of the last decades, which has certainly produced more results than their male counterparts. We can hear the good books she read, the strenght of convinction, the correspondence of desires and aspirations, a language and gaze born out of feelings, or better, from a feeling of existence as passion which is destined to non fulfillment, to a survival in defeat that is reproduced and regenerated. Mariateresa Di Lascia chose some extraordinary "moth

ers" , extraordinarily solitary ones, like Morante and Ortese, primarily the former. At the beginning of the novel you feel her weight and you fear she'll be imitated, but very quickly such fear dissipates, melting at the warmth of a vision and a writing that is very autonomous. The plot of the novel also unravels from mother to daughter (like another recent writer from the area near Naples, Ferrante, who has been able to excavate inside this relationship with particular cruelty), and is the story of a Southern family, an eminently Southern family. From another time, not too long ago, when the South was still fully the South, and families were a knot, full of members and surprises, affection and conflict, of explicit and hidden things which involved your whole life, that protected and oppressed you for your whole life.. Telling the story of "Passaggio in ombra" is in a certain sense superfluous: its plot is as simple and as complicated as that of any family history, and the author is able to masterfully

weave in a simple manner with a reference to the essence of family relations even in their complexity. It is important, though, to say two things about the novel as they are the essence of the story. The first is the relationship existing between the men and the women - in this family that is no more exceptional than any other, but like all families is unique and out of the ordinary. There is constant attraction and squaring off.. We are in a society where men rule, but it is they who embody instability, the difficulty of duration, superficiality in relations, while the women are the binding element, faithfullness, continuity which is too often frustrated and betrayed by men. In speaking about the D'Auria's, one of its male family members, a "bastard" to be precise , says the following:: "No, you can't say they're bad... They are just fickle, that's it! They are fickle and ferocious!" This is true as far as the women are concerned (the massive donna Peppina, which seems to me one of the most succe

ssful female character study in our literature) but it is true mainly about the men, and for the father and son duo Tripoli and Francesco, who in the novel arrange and disarrange, with fickleness and ferociousness, the lives of Anita and that of the narrator, Chiara, respectively Francesco's rejected wife and daughter.

Chiara's life is marked by the irregularity of her birth, just like that of her "bastard" cousin, with whom she falls in love when she is an adolescent.. Everyone is supposed to not know about Saverio's existence and its relation to the D'Autrias.

Any love, in a closed society and a clan risks being an incest. There can be no love between Chiara and Saverio because of the condemnation - a non expressed, mysterious, genetic and social guilt- which weighs on incest, but every family reproduces that fault, hides in its very fiber the mark of that fault . It is a risk which is that of closure and for this reason it is ever stronger in closed societies. Betrayal is the betrayal of fathers, but faithfulness is the faithfulness of mothers

The portrait of a Southern family and society, "Passaggio in ombra" is narrated in the first person and with flash backs by the protagonist, Chiara, from the lowest point of her fall and her loneliness - a choice that was an open ribellion and challenge of the fathers that the women dared not "kill" (She is not like the Beatrice Cenci of old and she cannot contemplate the possibility of patricide, perhaps because it is the complicity of the other women themselves that prevents it, as well as the complexity of the ties, the binds of kinship). From the depths of the fall, but this is the greatness of the book, to the heights of the golden experience (D'auria - [similar to aureo= golden] the last name is certainly not a casual choice) of a happy time, the one in which even tragedy is life, the time in which the murmuring or the screaming of life invades people sweeping them away with its wind and lights, its astonishments and a range of possibilities which appear sto be infinite.

Had Mariateresa Di Lascia not died she would have become a great writer, but one can say that of her even with one fully completed novel. We greet the appearence of this intense, broad, engaging, colorful, sorrowful and vital book with an underlying resentment against fate that took away the life of a woman of such great talent and will prevent us from reading other works of hers. Hers too was a "passaggio in ombra", which was brief but full of light, the meaning of which can be gathered in the luminosity and glory of these marvelous pages, giving joy to the reader who leaves them with the sadness of a final goodbye.

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POLITICS AS POETRY

The remembrance

by Generoso Picone

Beautiful, Mariateresa Di Lascia was beautiful, a woman who is no longer with a us but has left us a book to keep her alive. Beautiful, Mariateresa Di Lascia was beautiful and was forty years old when she died, mid August of last year, with a cancer that destroyed her within a few weeks. "When I do something I do it right", she said to her partner, Sergio D'Elia, jesting about her fixation with precision and rigor. And no one will ever be able to understand how much it cost her, she who loved life and people to the extreme, voraciously with unequalled energy.

She was born in Rocchetta Sant'Antonio, near Foggia, on January 3, 1954. She became active in the Radical Party at the beginning of the Eighties and in 1982 became the National Vice-Secretary, with Marco Pannella as Secretary, and later a representative in Parliament. In 1987 she engaged in campaigns for human rights in Eastern Europe and coordinated the campaign against nuclear power. She founded the league "Hands off Cain" to abolish capital punishment. Together with Adriano Sofri, in 1993 she started the initiative "I fast' to help war victims in the former Yugoslavia.

Years of battles, of struggles, of politics.

"She was a political person in the good sense of the word", explains Emma Bonino: "She was highly intelligent and cut to the core of the issues right away with her language that was evocative but not messy like the one used by Pannella. Mariateresa was able to never be mediocre or conformist. It was hard to love her because of her harsh and impatient character, but it was also more valuable because of this". Her bad temper was Her temper, impatient, aggressive "you shouldn't deny anyone an argument", she used to say, but all she wanted to do with her apparent aggressivity was to get people to speak up and bring out the best of themselves" This according to Sergio D'Elia, who is now Secretary of "Hands off Cain", the league founded by Mariateresa. D'Elia met her towards the end of 1986 when he was still jailed as a member of Prima Linea and had joined the Radical Party.

"Mariateresa was a great help in makling me emerge from that experience without a sense of defeat and to recover the best part of myself both while I was in jail and later "

"Passaggio in ombra" is the result of four years of writing, from 1988 to 1992. Before that Mariateresa had completed "La coda della lucertola" (The lizard's tail), a novel that she decided not to publish. Later, she won the "Millelire" prize with her short story "Il compleanno' (The birthday), and last year she had started to work on a new novel entitled " Le relazioni sentimentali" (Love relations), which was left unfinished. In 1990 she sent "Passaggio in ombra" to Adelphi (a famous publisher) - adds D'Elia- "Ena Marchi gave a very positive assessment of it while Pontiggia expressed some doubts about its narrative structure. So nothing came out of that. Feltrinelli instead published it practically like Maria Teresa had written it".

"Passaggio in ombra" is now there to testify about a writer who has already been likened to Elsa Morante, Anna Maria Ortese, Marguerite Yourcenar. "The book let me see a part of Maria Teresa that was hidden", this is the assessment Emma Bonino gives at a human level. "I read its pages and I feel Maria Teresa is still with me , with her sense of vision, her poetry", says Sergio D'Elia. The first book Maria Teresa gave him was "The Little Prince", by Antoine Saint-Exupery, a book that represented her own point of view of the world, on the side of children whom she loved and above all respected.

"This is the way Maria Teresa understood politics, the same way as "The little prince", a innocent, rigorous way that never compromised itself. This was Mariateresa and this she still is."