The abyss of the end of life in Caringella's novel

Almost two thousand five hundred years ago. It is Socrates who speaks. In Plato's Phaedo. "The gods take care of us and we are their possession. [...] Therefore, considered from this aspect, it seems logical that man should not kill himself before God has in some way placed him in such a necessity as that in which I have now been placed'. About four centuries later, we hear Cicero in De senectute: 'Pythagoras forbids one to depart from one's garrison and guard of life without the permission of the emperor, that is, of God'.

Unavailabilityism - according to which a man can freely dispose of his 'ways of being', but not of his own 'being or not being' - therefore has remote roots, older than the analogous Christian view. Opposed to it is the thesis that instead considers the individual's dominion over his own body complete, to the point of self-suppressive gesture: my death belongs to me, since - says Balzac in The Shagreen Skin - "chaque suicide est un poème sublime de mélancolie".

But to what extent does unavailability - so rigid in its absoluteness - make sense when life becomes mere physical survival, with almost no relationship with the outside world? Life completely entrusted, moreover, to the support of equipment that replaces natural organic functions, which are now inactive? Is it therefore permissible - both ethically and legally - to render aid to a person who is in such a condition that he or she is not autonomous even in committing suicide?

With pensive levity of colour Francesco Caringella tackles these ultimate questions today in his novel L'attesa dell'alba (Mondadori, 2025, pp. 210, € 19.50): a story full of the poetics of restraint, where love in many of its declinations - conjugal, parental, filial, or just blossoming - is called upon to measure itself against the different rules that morality, religion and law establish to define the uncertain position of he who in any way facilitates the free suicidal intention of an individual in a very serious and irreversible health condition.

A theory of characters exquisitely cut out by the author passes before our eyes, who entrusts some of them with the task of acquainting the reader with the terms of the (ethical and) legal debate on the current perimeter of the crime of aiding suicide. A matter of great delicacy and stringent topicality, even after the Constitutional Court's ruling that in 2019 - ruling on the case of Marco Cappato, the activist blamed for facilitating dj Fabo to realise his lethal intention - declared aiding suicide not punishable when it concerns a person 'kept alive by life-support treatments and affected by an irreversible pathology, source of physical or psychological suffering that she considers intolerable, but fully capable of making free and conscious decisions'.