At the centre of the book is the story of Guglielmo, a high school senior who, although resourceful and capable, does not fit into the world of school. Through the tale of his friend Ferdinando, a history enthusiast, he seems to be projected into the story of a friar, Father Maximilian Kolbe, who in the black hole of Europe saved the life of a fellow prisoner by accepting death by hunger and thirst. The narrative focuses on Guglielmo's determination not to back down and peer into the dark. In this exercise of the gaze, Guglielmo sees the mercy of the friar towards the chief, the author of such a despicable death, but overwhelmed, in spite of himself, by the love of an extreme gesture; he sees Anita, the wife of the chief, increasingly intolerant of the system in which her husband is immersed, and he sees, albeit from a distance and with modesty, the slow wearing away of the friar and his companions. In this visionary perspective, Guglielmo doubles himself. He is 19 years old here, in 2011, he has friends, desires, expectations, a story just beginning with Clarissa and 39 years old there, in 1941. There, he lives in Krakow, a city occupied and humiliated, and not far from the black hole, a figurative expression of Auschwitz in the novel. There, his name is Abel, he is an architect and he too, by special circumstances, meets Anita, 'suffers' the figure of the leader and feels unreflectively the strength of the friar...
Graziella Bonansea studied in Turin and Paris, where she obtained a PhD (Doctorat d'État) in History of Cultural Imaginaries of the 20th Century in 1991. She has held seminars at the University of Turin, Women's History courses at the University of Eastern Piedmont in Vercelli and participated from 2013 to 2018 in a research project on 'Bodies, Memories and Boundaries' in the new European scenarios, promoted by the European Research Council and reporting to the European University Institute in Florence. A founding member of the Italian Society of Historians, she has published numerous essays in Italy and abroad on subjectivity, the memory of trauma, the imaginary of the body and its visuality with reference both to the younger generations in contemporary Europe and to some crucial moments in the history of the 20th century: Fascism, the World Wars, the 1950s. Her latest essay, to be published in the United States in 2021 by New York publisher Berghahn, focuses on contemporary migration and the resulting change in the European landscape in the gestural, visual and corporeal representations of the younger generations.
Challenged by new looks and languages towards history and memory, she opened up to literary writing in the late 1990s. She published different books.
Più che la notte (More than night), published in 2021 by Edizioni San Paolo, is her latest novel.