It was a great pleasure for a writer like me to actively collaborate in the EU-Read&Art project and witness the evolutions that led the participating readers and learners to transform “Il figlio del mare” (Pellegrini Editore, 2020), my first novel set in Calabria, from the physical format of the book to the digital format of the booktrailer.
An experience that enriched everyone, starting from the presentation of the book to the groups of participants and up to the creation of the texts for the synopsis and the storyboard, answering the questions and curiosities of the working group also relating to my personal writing techniques.
The plot tells the awakening of Bianca, the protagonist, on the Calabrian Ionian, on the beach. The little girl fell asleep a virgin to wake up, violated, in a surreal scenario.
Was it the wave that placed the pearl of a new life in her lap? That son of the tide will be Jo for all, pronounced in the American style by those who do not know the real name of the child, the same as the sea that seems to have generated him. It will be a return trip to Calabria, thirty years after that morning, to reveal the secrets of a life spent far away, in oblivion.
A journey down memory lane, which crosses Italy and the pain of a child who became an adult too quickly. A dive into the past, in the arms of a land that knows how to be mother and stepmother; where life resists, calls for new life and fights, tenacious like the brooms bent by the north wind. The land of origins narrated as an archetype of itself, a “non-place”, a geographical and imaginative space.
A story declined according to the scaffolding of the Greek tragedy, where the prose of the chapters intertwines the lyric of the choral interventions.
Author: Eliana Iorfida, writer
Comments