The gushing of a love: "Ocean of Senses"
by
Maria Teresa De Donato
Review by
Sabrina Santamaria, Freelance Writer
A heartfelt THANK YOU to Dr. Sabrina Santamaria, Author, Poetess, Honorary Member of the World Union of Poets, for her wonderful review of my recently published Fiction novel that is already being read all over the world.
A heartfelt THANK YOU to Dr. Sabrina Santamaria,
Author, Poetess, Honorary Member of the World Union of Poets, for her wonderful
review of my recently published Fiction novel that is already being read all
over the world.
The
gushing of a love: "Ocean of Senses" by Maria Teresa De Donato
Following the center of gravity of one's emotions
and sensations means reaching a full and conscious maturity. It is a goal that is not always easy and
obvious. Love as a feeling fully lived
by the body and the soul is the complete syntagma of the psycho-physical
well-being of the human being. Sometimes,
without love, a person can start down alone in a chaos of days without awareness
and allow life to go by unnecessarily in a monotonous and apathetic way. Claudia, the protagonist of the novel
"Ocean of Senses", will end up for many years living a flat and unemotional
life; a chance encounter will forever mark her existence, her love story with
Eugenio. Is living a love story and a love
affair the same? Does being completely
involved in love happen to anyone? What
does love truly mean? These and other
questions asks our author, Maria Teresa De Donato, herself through her female
character Claudia. The latter is the
woman every man would like to have, to marry: passionate, sweet, sensitive,
sensual and cultured. Our protagonist is
very sociable, self-confident and intelligent; she has an excellent
relationship with her parents, Rosaria and Franco, who love her dearly. Some events, though, will destroy the serenity
of our protagonist.
Maria Teresa De Donato has strong qualities in that
she accompanies the reader with her narrating voice, involving him in the
narrative setting through a fluid, fluent, but not rhetorical trend; the one who
reads feels to be taken by the hand by the author who with feeble and
colloquial voice accompanies her readers hand in hand through the pages of her
novel. "Ocean of Senses" is a
subdued emotional river laid bare in the heart of a wounded woman who has only
one need: to tell her story. Teresa De
Donato composes, in my opinion, her warp plot on two main narrative fabrics:
the historical-sociological theme and the amorous theme. With regard to the first thematic junction, the
Author has framed her novel in a time of the story that goes from the early
twentieth century to the seventies: fascism, the colonization campaigns of
Mussolini, the Libyan submission to Italy are the frame of the story; the
various historical references (which I particularly appreciated) of the Roman
Empire that conquered Libya enrich and adorn the novel, as they give the work a
wealth of content and act as literary expedients for a psychological
characterization of the characters. The
other preponderant theme of the novel is love, an aspect described in detail as
it exposes the need for the encounter with the other as fullness of soul and
body; our author does not accept the idea, still widespread today, of a love
detached from the body, aseptic and platonic. Love is "something
magical", she writes in the novel, still not entirely explainable in
scientific terms, it is mysterious and, as such, makes the human beings who are
able to experience it totally vital, if fully lived according to the needs that
the sensuality of the body recalls; it brings a state of well-being to those
who experience it and not a condition of slavery and banal emotional duties. The Author likewise warns us against thinking
that the feeling of love borders on spirituality and touches only the climax of
orgasm.
She states, through Claudia's reflections, that
love is the perfect and synchronized union of two spirits who become one
through the union of the bodies. The
background of the work does not constitute a banal romance novel without logic:
"Ocean of Senses" is a flood of sensations of the characters that
wraps the attention of the reader in a light, yet captivating reading,
attracting his curiosity. It is a book
written for those who still know how to hope for the profound feelings of the
soul and for those who, perhaps, wish to rekindle their hope towards love so
that the end of a story does not culminate in a complete fossilization of the being.
The message that Maria Teresa De Donato
leaves us has a strong imprint: it suggests that after an end there is always a
new beginning and we must always have reasons for living each moment of our
existence, because it makes us aware of who we truly are; for embracing the
still images of our history; for risking our experiences, in the difficult, unpredictable,
timeless and measureless life match of our choices that could bring us much
sorrow, and yet mark our identity without regrets. Our Author leads her reader to an ocean full
of purely human feelings that unfold with elegance and harmony between the
pages of the text in which her characters, Claudia and Eugenio, run into the
vortex of a deep passion, and choose to fully live their emotions without
regretting having withheld the sinuous gushing of a spark that shoots very
rarely in two hearts that learn how to really love one another.
Sabrina
Santamaria
