Col buio me la vedo io

I will deal with the darkness

As every reader knows, when narrative tension meets stylistic command, the pages fly by. A voice that stands out, a rare literary debut. Lucia Carbone is sixteen years old. Her first name derives from “luce”, “light”, while her last name means “coal”: like “darkness and light, rage and love”. After all, everything appears before her eyes in pairs: for instance, male and female, good and bad, body and mind. And, above all, the world above, the one she inhabits every day with her family, and the world below: the dark cellar where she locked up Rosario after kidnapping him. Everything is unpredictable in this high-level, magnetic book. Because everything, absolutely everything, matures in the language and imagination of an author who has a lot to say and a very original way of doing so. Reggio Calabria, early Eighties. Sixteen-year-old Lucia Carbone is the daughter of a lower middle-class family living in a low-income neighborhood, and she attends a classical studies high school. She kidnaps a classmate, Rosario Cristallo, the son of an ’ndrangheta boss, and locks him up in the basement of her grandmother’s house, which had been empty since the woman’s death a few months before. Lucia kidnapped him for two good (or bad) reasons: the first is that her best friend Beatrice is in love with him, and she wants to keep him away from her; the second is that Rosario might know something about the murder of a beloved aunt of hers. While Lucia visits her prisoner every day, her life carries on in its seemingly usual way. At home, her father is busy in his little study making matchstick models, while her mother is morbidly attached to her little brother Gedo. In the neighborhood, there is sharing and solidarity, and a few quirky characters with their tics and “poetic pieces of paper”. At school, Lucia falls in love with Carmine, an uptown boy. Meanwhile, Reggio is a wounded city that has not yet come to terms with the revolt of the Seventies and is emerging from the first Mafia war; the city is the stage for clashes between the Youth Front and the Student Collective: there is a sort of widespread violence, which takes different paths. There is violence in Lucia’s everyday gestures and objects as well: for instance, in that red knife she finds in her hands as she descends into the world below, where she keeps her secret. Until everything turns upside down, the above and the below become confused along with all the opposites, and she comes to an unexpected decision. Col buio me la vedo io is a novel that builds a universe little by little, with strength, coherence, and stunning creativity. It is filled with pages worth framing, such as those where a mother and daughter fold the sheets, calibrating their gestures in a kind of Western duel. And it is also a book about justice and the South, far from all clichés: she doesn’t resort to using dialect for a colorful effect; instead, she does so sparingly and always to seek out the only possible meaning. Because dialect can be used to “screen or to clarify, it is the language of grown-ups, it works both ways”. And food is, above all, an instrument of power and control: “If I feed you, you are safe, and you are mine”. The concrete and creative way in which Anna Mallamo circles around certain themes (family, war, women, truth, border, home), re-adjusting definitions as the story progresses, will stick with readers for a long time.