Il mare verticale

We usually refer to our minds borrowing the imagery of the sea: we explore ‘the depths’ of our brains, the conscious part of us is the one that ’emerges’, while the part of unconscious remains always ‘sunken’; and Freud himself coined the expression ‘oceanic feeling‘ to describe that sensation of limitless and unbounded energy that from time to time overwhelms us. Il mare verticale tells a story of human fragility, barely outlined, a story about the desire to nurture one’s personal and unique individuality, while remaining exquisitely normal. India is a young teacher who suffers from panic attacks that sometimes are so intense as to paralyse her. She is advised to leave the school, but she decides to embrace her disturb, sharing her trouble with her schoolchildren and transposing it in a sort of epic tale in which the heroine, Hava, has to face an insidious monster, Kalabibi. This trick instantly brings the reader back to childhood and to that astonishing experience of just sitting and hearing a story. What apparently seems to be unspeakable here turns out to be universally accessible, and everyone will finally be able to empathize with the specific condition of India.