“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. Read everything…
