Marta, a Breath of Life
by Daniela Merola, Journalist, Author
Review by Maria Teresa De Donato
“Panta rei” – everything flows – the ancient
Greeks used to say. Everything flows just like in this novel: a novel with an
immediate language, sometimes crude and even cynical, a fast-paced, almost
neurotic rhythm, like a river in flood. A highly allegorical fiction novel in
which Marta Renzulli is not only the protagonist. Marta Renzulli embodies an
entire Humanity; she is the metaphor of a World that, traveling at the speed of
light, struggles between its continuous desire to advance towards the unknown and
reach otherwise unattainable goals and its anger, mixed with regret, for a past
it looks at with nostalgia for how it could have been, but it was not.
From this arises the perennial attempt to
achieve a balance between what is perceived as one's own self, as the deepest
essence of one's own being, and what the world offers or forces to be with its
game rules. A 'decadent', almost 'crepuscular' attitude and feeling emerge
through the analysis of the love for, and, at the same time, the rejection of her
native culture, a country culture, considered bigoted and restrictive, that the
protagonist of the novel hates because she feels so contrary to her
personality, her desire for freedom, her desire to know, to explore the world,
to get involved, on the one hand, and which she looks at, on the other, with
melancholy, with regret for having been forced to leave those places which,
however, in a hidden corner of her soul, she loves and misses.
Everything flows.
Everything changes: drastically and just as suddenly in a general framework
where precariousness reigns supreme in both family and couple relationships
that are emptied of all form and substance "in the society of
nothingness".
In the vortex of existential anguish that
leads to fleeing from one place to another and from one situation to another
..., when in reality one is only fleeing from oneself ..., it becomes essential
to repossess the "breath of life" that everyone has in oneself. The
perennial rush towards a goal that one cannot identify and whose lack makes one
feel terribly alone, unable to find one's place in the world, leads to such a
level of alienation that it leads to highly destructive behavior, while trying
long to chase a train on which it seems you can never get on. However, the
solution of this great discomfort, of all problems, real or perceived as such,
is paradoxically simple, easy to achieve and under the eyes of all: to be loved
unconditionally, understood, and appreciated.
