Ferito a morte

Ferito a morte is a book you can’t get rid of. It is like a sort of boomerang: even if you wanted to toss it with all your strength as far away as possible (say, because it is too beautiful, so as not to feel inferior), it would take advantage of the curvature of space-time and return to you, coming up behind you and catching you by surprise. Might as well give up: re-read it once in a while, and every time you finish the last chapter go back to the first one. I warned you, now do as you please. – Sandro VeronesiThe story from Ferito a morte (The Mortal Wound) takes place over the span of eleven years: from the summer of 1943, when the protagonist Massimo De Luca met Carla Boursier during a bombing, until the day he moved to Rome at the beginning of the summer of 1954. Between these two moments in time, the story unfolds in fragments and flashes, each one present and remembered, each one referring to a different year, even though they all seem to be magically enclosed in the arc of one morning: underwater fishing, the boredom of the yacht club, lunch at De Luca’s house… The last three chapters also present a summary of all of Massimo’s subsequent trips to Naples, his disenchanted returns to the city that “mortally wounds you or makes you fall asleep, or both at the same time;” the city that he identifies with the unattainable Carla, with the sea, with the myths of youth. As E. M. Forster wrote, if “the final test of a novel will be the readers’ affection for it,” then Ferito a morte passed it with flying colors. The book, which the author himself defined as “not easy,” is a cult for many critics and writers; it was (and still is) a popular book,loved and read, emotionally followed, even by readers who don’t know much about literary issues but found in it their same nostalgia for a paradise lost and for a “perfect day.” It is therefore a book of initiation, revelation, and discovery with universal value.