A novel thetrum mundi
"Madness and love become two new forms of gnosis, they unveil reality, the secrets of the mind, the iniquity of History", writes Wanda Marasco about her new book "Behind This World".
2' min read
2' min read
Writer, actress, director and teacher, Wanda Marasco has won several awards in her career: the Montale for her collection of poems, Voc e Poè, in 1997, the Bagutta opera prima for her first novel L'arciere d'infanzia, in 2003, and many others. He is now in the finals for the Campiello prize with Di spalle a questo mondo (Neri Pozza, pp. 416, euro 20).
Could you describe this novel?
Back to this world is a novel thetrum mundi. It opens with a look at the tower that stands on the eastern edge of the Capodimonte hill. This is where Ferdinand Palasciano and his wife Olga Pavlova Vavilova lived. We are between 1887 and the decades before and after the unification of Italy. Everything had already happened in the lives of the two. Palasciano, a doctor and philanthropist, is struck by madness in the last years of his life. He is a man who takes on the world's pain. He was the first to proclaim the principle of neutrality on which the International Red Cross is based. He is a Gino Strada of his time, animated by the powerful ideal of care. The cure to be brought to all, without discrimination. Like every deeply ethical man, he is persecuted. Olga, a Russian noblewoman, comes to him with a limp that is both real and symbolic: a metaphor for universal claudication, for a fragility and failure inherent in human beings. From their meeting, an absolute love is born. Madness and love become two new forms of gnosis, revealing reality, the secrets of the mind, the iniquity of History. I always say that mine is not just a historical novel. I have used historical material as a foil, trying to sculpt it with the intensity of poetry and the movements of the psyche.
Why did you feel the need to tell this story?
The need to tell this story arises from the drama of our present. Wars, epidemics, natural catastrophes, the conflagration of the human we are witnessing, the 'wound' in the most intimate and most universal sense. Ferdinand and Olga lived through these experiences as we do today. Their story, in the end, is ours and could not help but press in and be born.
