L’isola e il tempo

It is not often that one comes across books like this, vivid and unsettling in the power of their story and writing. Imagine a volcanic island of wild beauty south of Sicily, at the threshold of the 1960s. And imagine the arrival of a small green boat carrying an exhausted castaway and the corpse of a woman, his wife. It is an event that breaks the tranquillity of that world, then slowly everyone returns to their lives. But for the protagonist of L’isola e il tempo, those days, and the investigation that followed, are a subject to be recounted for thirty years to anyone who takes the trouble to listen: women who pass by, street urchins, tourists who gradually change the face of the island. Because in those few hours, an unsolved enigma is condensed, first and foremost within him. There are places that are worlds unto themselves. Such is the unnamed island opposite ‘Mpidusa in the late 1950s: a few inhabitants who have known each other forever, three peaks seen from the sea, dry vegetation, black earth. And the toil of men and women for their livelihood: fishing, the meagre cultivation of capers and lentils, a few animals. The rhythm of the days is broken by the arrival of a small boat with two people on board: a living man and a dead woman. A fire destroyed their sailboat, says the survivor, and the Domoculta couple and their three children also lost their lives in the shipwreck. While Marshal Bonomo opens an investigation, convinced he will soon be able to close it, thirteen-year-old Nonò improvises as a detective. He listens to everyone’s conversations hidden in the most unlikely corners, sniffs out clues and pieces together the puzzle. But everything is more complicated than it seems, and this story, just like the island at dawn, appears shrouded in mirages.

To recognise its boundaries, you have to step back, fix your gaze on the landscape, on small details: even certain places – the barracks, the marina, Tina’s pergola – mark, as they change, the time and meaning of things. That is why the whole story must be told, calmly and from the beginning, to anyone who passes by, in search of the thread that keeps escaping from the picture. Even when the investigation is coming to an end, Nonò does not stop running around the island and searching the seabed to find the spot where the boat sank. And when he finally manages to reach it, with the help of his brother Filippo, he discovers another body alongside those of the Domoculta family: that of the culprit. But who can believe him, when everyone now says he has lost his mind? Because, in fact, just as the mystery is unravelled, everything begins to become tangled in Nonò’s memory, which at times removes the most painful parts of the story. A wounded narrator, rather than an unreliable one. In this novel, which is characterised by powerful, majestic and natural writing, time bites its own tail, it is defined but also mobile: a time in which everything continues to happen. And the narrator, with the illusion of eventually reaching a different ending, remains forever hooked – along with the reader – on the unsolved enigma.