"Passaggio in ombra" is a very good book, but there won't be others by the author.

SUMMARY. According to the author, Maria Teresa Di Lascia has at least been spared the fate awaiting many young authors who are forced by the publishing, advertising, television machine to repeat themselves constantly, in a mad effort to prolong their first success, the price of not doing it being abandonment and oblivion. None of the good writers like Calvino or Bassani used to hang around t.v. studios, but today writers are forced to do it. Di Lascia's novel has in her best pages the same qualities that were in Morante's work. Once again the South has given us a real jewel.

(IL RESTO DEL CARLINO, LA NAZIONE, March 12, 1995)

"Those who are dear to the Gods die young" is what the Ancients used to say and sometimes, overcoming the natural pity that a premature death inspires in us, we too are tempted to believe it This is the case for an author who died at forty years of age, who left a single published novel of an uncommonly high quality, with a writing that often brings to mind the same kind of enchantment, half way between a fairy-tale and a vision, that characterized the best work of Elsa Morante, especially in "Menzogna e sortilegio". Readers are left wondering what she could have still given to literature, protected as she is now from the obligation to produce novels just for the sake of "confirming her talent", to have people clamor at the miracle of her production. In the face of this likely fate, how can one not believe that the Ancients were right? Just recently I was reading the ads for a novel written by a young Italian writer, who had just released her nth work within a few years, and I was very sad to read that

comment, at the bottom of the page, by a famous literary critic, confirming the value of the young Milanese writer. We know very well what kind of torment is hidden behind these constant confirmations, the horrendous publishing machine demanding new productions, with great speed, from writers who have distinguished themselves by their first work. if you do not conform, the price is oblivion and disappearence from the scenes, in this literary society feeding on stardom parameters set by t.v., constructing characters supeimposed on the writer. Did Calvino or Costanzo ever have to show up at the Costanzo Show or at Pippo Baudo's programs?

Did we ever see Bassani or Calvino at the Sanremo Festival? Within the human tragedy of her premature death- she was born in Rocchetta Sant'Antonio , near Foggia on January 3, 1954 and died in Septemberr of last year in Rome-a sure literary favour has been granted to Mariateresa Di Lascia. She will be spared that omnivorous publishing machine that is always searching for novelties in order to renew itself and is incapable of following in older, established writers those elements that renew themselves consistently with an inspiration, a world, an experience.

Those who will read "Passaggio in ombra" -which was just published by Feltrinelli- will perhaps be influenced by the premature death of the writer, but will find in all pages that light magic touch which immediately sets forth a destiny for the character. Very few novelists are able to give in just a few lines a sense of foreboding about all a character will say and experience. It is the story of a young girl, Chiara, born in Apulia in the Fifties, the daughter of anita, the town's mid-wife who is not married with the father of the baby.. The word "bastard' a key word that Chiara with the mysterious instinct of children learns right away, reverberates in the girl's fate, even as she becomes a beautiful girl, and after her mother's death as she was about to marry Francesco, Chiara's father. Without knowing that the boy is her cousin, Chiara falls in love with Saverio, the young man often mentioned with trepidation and allusions by her mother and Aunt Giuseppina. On one side, Anita and Francesco experie

nce the perfect overlappiug of love and guilt, as though the absolute towards which the women in this book tend bring with it the only, inevitable result of the solitude of dreams. Of great interest is the author's point of view as she narrates the autobiography of her childhood. You sense that she does not project herself in the future but in the past, as she has surrendered to tasting life in the echo of memory, once its fairytale-like innocence belonging to the child Clara is lost (here is the Morantian myth). We admit that it is difficult to not associate this surrender of memory to the foreboding of an horizon that is already over in the future. Even the title "Passaggio in ombra" conjures up an unconscious far-sightedness (ability to see in the future) and desire to escape. This novel is another jewel the South has given us, a South where just until yesterday relationships between human beings seemed governed by ancient and archetypal laws far from mass society, a bit suspended and atemporal lik

e in a fable. The gaze of a woman, her specific perspective which tendstowards being rather than doing, enriches this narrative work that will not be open to comparison with later works. It is a kind of " celibate machine".