La babilonese

Nineveh, 6th century B.C.: the life of Libbali, wife of the god-king Ashurbanipal, flows unchanged until a young Jewish prisoner with lapis lazuli eyes arrives at the royal ziggurat. An overwhelming passion arises between Avhiram and Libbali, destined to be discovered with tragic consequences: on the day Avhiram is executed and the queen’s daughters pay for their mother’s guilt with their lives, Libbali escapes death thanks to a little girl who carries an oil lamp in her hands and drags her with her on an endless flight through time. London, 1848: archaeologist Henry Layard, discoverer of the Assyrian cities, is haunted by a vision of a woman accompanied by a little girl carrying an oil lamp. Naples, 1655: while the plague rages, the painter Aniello Falcone meets the sorceress Albali and her elusive daughter. In 1683, the erudite Sebastiano Resta discovered a drawing by Falcone alluding to a madonna or sorceress. And it is 1881 when Filomena Argento, the last of a dynasty of silk merchants, inherits that drawing and meets Madame Ballu, a necromancer, and her daughter… Finally, in today’s Naples, a couple faces the failure of an entrepreneurial project: their destiny will also be marked by their encounter with a bright young girl. ‘A trauma builds a memory jam: until it is overcome we will tell about it, waiting for words to exhaust it’. In this dizzying novel of romances, each character has an immense pain and burning love to go through, and thus to narrate. From cuneiform writing to the memory of computers, from a fabulous ancient city to Victorian London to Naples, which – as Malaparte wrote – would resemble Nineveh if it had not been destroyed, La babilonese questions us: can the flame of vengeance survive those who seek it and remain ever alive, like that of passion? Is it not, instead, that the memory of life is destined to be lost like the cuneiform signs on clay tablets, like the mummy’s head that Filomena Argento preserves, like the damaged memory of hard disks?