Cartagloria

Rosa Matteucci returns, ‘merciless, fierce singer of “despite”,’ as Carlo Fruttero once described her, comparing her to Céline, Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. This new novel, like her others, teeters on the illusory ridge between comedy and tragedy. It begins with her childhood’s anxious, tormented aspiration to receive, like all her ancestors and peers, her First Communion, and continues with the death of a much-loved – albeit very reckless – father and his haphazard burial. In Rosa Matteucci’s heart-rending and at the same time grotesque writing, even the journey, not only inner, that this death will provoke, in search of that ancient Transcendent that our time seems to have lost, becomes comic: from the gurus of India to the Pyrenees of Bernadette, from the prayer groups of Soka Gakkai to a daring visit to an exorcist monk who, barricaded in a hermitage, sells missals with built-in audio rosaries. A wandering that culminates in the discovery of the Tridentine rite, where she will learn the protocol of genuflections, always chasing a salvation that seems to be called into question with every sentence, every breath. Until the final realisation that it is necessary to accept, and perhaps even love, one’s own cross.