“Magnificat Amour” by Isabella Santacroce (Il Assayer)
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by Grazia Pulvirenti
The flame of a candle. Unspecified location. An interior. Visions take shape amidst incense smoke. Between the words. A distillation of words, a distillation of visions. Those that came from punch by ETA Hoffmann, in comparison, appear feeble, pale, evanescent. Those that Isabella Santacroce evokes, in a magnetic flow, are powerful, they arise from one descensio to hell and from the asceticism of a word that longs for the absolute. And she draws on it. Ùsque ad sidera: “One sinks into pain to ascend” (p. 378).
Magnificat amour, Santacroce’s latest novel, just published by Il Saggiatore, is a vortex in which passions, torments, moments of ecstasy, ascents of precipices take shape and are consumed. In a chorality of voices, each different from the other, each manifestation of an individual abyss, of an anguish that cannot fail to trouble the heart and soul of the living, whatever their social background, their age, homesickness.
Pain is the stigma that unites characters so different from each other, which moves their steps on sharp splinters, among rotting residues of life, blinded by the brilliance of ephemeral flashes. Yet the writing, between analepsis and anachronies, ellipses and paralysis, never becomes an autofiction-style narration of one’s stumbles, of one’s suffering: “Pain must not be told, a blade stuck in a cry. The pain must not be told, the strength that sustains love is tireless” (p. 369).
On this trip without nostos, a journey into nostalgia, into the desire to live, into bewilderment, there is a comet star, the search for love: “Only love is capable of walking on the edge of the abyss and across the tops of the mountains. Love, love once again” (p. 384).
Reporting contents would be belittling for a novel that draws on the sign and dream of literature understood in a sacred sense, as an alchemical transmutation from a state of heavy matter to the preciousness of an incandescent stone. It is the word that is incandescent, that creates a magmatic flow that stuns, that digs chasms from which one can intuit, among not rare epiphanies, a sense of wonder. For beauty. Perhaps this is precisely one of the secrets of this indefinable writing: the intuition of an unsettling, sharp beauty, which the word can lick, caress, consume, without ever being satisfied, without ever ceasing to crave it, even when it would seem to have achieved it, to be able to guard. And in this lies damnation and salvation, in this is manifested that literature which is now so lacking in the novels with which Italian publishing infests the market: literature which is art, a metamorphosis of the opacities of existence in a word capable to scream it and transcend it: “The indefinable that moves and rises is elsewhere.” (p. 391)
The goal of Santacroce’s writing is elsewhere, an elsewhere that is at the same time an intuition of sublime spheres of existence but also immanence, a crossing of suffering, of darkness, of silence: “There must be something else that is just lightness, like you , light that strikes this shadow that sums me up. But you don’t talk to me. You only have words for flowers” (p. 383).
Because, paradoxically, it is in this magma that everything burns with words, the cipher of silence, the uncontaminated space from which, as for Hofmannsthal, light flows: “After that evening I understood silence, joyful white goddess.” (p. 387)
And from these peaks comes the ethical dimension of a word that is never satisfied with expressing the evil that passes through us, because it aims to tear apart the veil that covers the punishment, the darkness that blinds us. And there manifests itself, unexpectedly and hypnotically, the good, the love, the transcendence drawn from immanence: “Good has no time, it is a never-dampened spark that emerges from the eternal, burning in a reverberation to lead us back to the beginning of its birth .” The principle of its birth is the word of a mind “tangle of dawns”.
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Book details: “Magnificat Amour” by Isabella Santacroce (Il Saggiatore)
Lucrezia and Antonia are cousins, but they couldn’t be more different from each other. The first is beautiful, dedicated to a morbid care of the body and “mistress of the unclean, heroine of a life of foolishness”. The second is ugly, overlooked by everyone, “a doodle with an olive complexion” who at twenty-seven hasn’t kissed anyone yet. Bursting into their opposing existences, even if linked by the same need for redemption, will be Manfredi, a thirty-two year old pianist who moves in reality like a ghost, perhaps because he was a prodigy as a child, but today «in his gaze there are centuries of light on precipices of desires that have never come true.”
Then there is Sister Annetta, whom Lucrezia meets in a church at the end of a night of excess, a woman of troubled purity who is writing a book entitled Towards God and seems to have understood that the greatest request for love coincides with sin .
Between ex-Miss Cinema aunts, metaphonist relatives, alcoholic poets and oily millionaires, all poised between self-exaltation and martyrdom, the protagonists of this story seem to be incarnations of paranormal voices that manifest themselves in different times and places, but produced by the same mysterious ventriloquist.
After years of silence, Isabella Santacroce returns with a novel-monstrum of great esotericism, a modern human comedy that proceeds by intertwining with many of the author’s autobiographical events. A polyphonic score written with an inimitable language, at the peak of his artistic maturation.
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Isabella Santacroce she is an Italian writer. Among her books we remember Luminal (1998), Lulu Delacroix (2010) e love (2012).
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“Between the folds of stories”:
Among the folds of stories, among the ravines of what generally disappears, but which is full of meaning.
Column edited by Grazia Pulvirenti.
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