(by Clemente Angotti) COSTANTINO MUSTARI – ‘FATHER! A SIMPLE STORY’ – (TRALERIGHE BOOKS pp 142, euro 16) A ‘simple’ story but one that tells of an unbridgeable void. Of an absence that turns into existential discomfort mitigated, only in part, by an intergenerational friendship which, over time, despite many hardships, becomes an authentic bond like that between a parent and a child. In broad terms this is the story of Rinuccio, the protagonist of “Padre! A simple story”, the last book published by Tralerighe, which Costantino ‘Nino’ Mustari left us together with many ideas and projects he was working on.
It begins with a tragedy – the sudden and unexpected death of the young parent when little Rinuccio has just a few months to live – the story of a child who, although ‘tristu’ (restless) from an early age, is, in reality, how he will to see, “a good and kind person” capable of revealing himself however “at times impulsive and at times dangerous for himself and for those who deal with him”. With this story, between reality and fantasy, the repertoire of characters and life experiences that Nino Mustari has lined up in his literary production mainly focused on Taverna (Catanzaro), his hometown, Sila and the Presila, his favorite places.
Figures and settings that are found in many stories, the favorite literary form and that represents his peculiar stylistic figure. And even in this work, which also for this reason can easily be defined as a long story, the register is always the same: building a story starting from the life lived, assimilated through experiences and memories, then reworked with imagination and, finally, declined in a flat and flowing writing. At the center is the discomfort, an element that runs through all of Rinuccio’s adolescence and that is maintained even in adulthood. And that leads him to commit small crimes that cause him convictions and, even if for a short period, also make him know prison. Does all this depend on the lack of the father he lost when he was only three months old, on the absence of paternal affection and in any case of this important reference figure within the family and in his life? Certainly that void has marked him in some way.
A lack that he has always felt, since his early years, when he already wondered what the word “father” could mean, what mystery it hid, what a father was and why he didn’t have one. Questions that over time and in a background of love and family but also thanks to a passion for animals declined, over time, in a relatively successful job, happily transform, as Mustari tells us, into a fulfilled desire, and indeed greatly expanded, of paternity.
Reproduction reserved © Copyright ANSA
