A unicum of the Italian twentieth century, with more than one fluvial and unfinished book, and then this perfect story, in which there is nothing superfluous, “Scottature”, one of the peaks of Dolores Prato’s literary art. To the nuns who warn her not to leave the convent to risk running into the dangers and temptations of the world, which would burn her, the pupil responds by tasting her life…
The Lolita of literature made her debut at almost ninety years old, and there are still some of her unpublished works waiting to see the light. The work of a life, the twentieth century seen from a small province, There is no one down in the squarereached the general public thanks to Einaudi, although largely reworked, entrusted to the curator Natalia Ginzburg. Dolores Prato (much loved by critics in France, like another luxury outsider) may also be forgotten in her homeland literature, but thanks to the stubbornness and good taste of Quodlibet, a publishing house with headquarters in Macerata – and in the province of Macerata , in Treia, Dolores Prato lived the crucial years, also for her writing, from the age of five to adulthood – Dolores Prato lives in bookshops. Quodlibet managed to do what famous publishers didn’t have the courage to do: think of Mondadori itself which, thanks to the curatorship of Giorgio Zampa, published the full version of the masterpiece posthumously, only to then fail to perpetuate its memory with a permanent insertion in the catalogue, in a pocket series or in the major ones (in the Meridiani there is Scalfari, for example…).
A shadow, a difficult life
A unique one. Original, irregular, a shadow who lived apart, for a long time a literature teacher, in his last years in Rome, in via Fracassini 4, in a house that was a meeting place for writers and artists, such as Stefano D’Arrigo and his wife Jutta Bruto. She was the victim, mistakenly, of the racial laws, dismissed as a teacher, forced to get by with private lessons and other precarious jobs. The autobiographical subject, difficult childhood and adolescence in a village in the Marche region – not recognized by her father, entrusted by her mother to a canonical alchemist brother, then raised in a Salesian boarding school, before going around the world, graduating, also a student of Luigi Pirandello to the Magisterium, and teaching – are central to all his works.
An anomalous story
We men are closed between the beauty of the earth and that of the sky. To have had such precious custody, it may also be true that human pain is precious.
Just one sentence like this would be enough to give the measure of how simple and at the same time polished Dolores Prato’s writing can be. Burns (84 pages, 12 euros), which Quodlibet offers in a new edition, with some letters (among the exceptional interlocutors Ungaretti and Palazzeschi), in which various attempts to publish are read, and a note to the text by the curator Elena Frontaloni, it is the only book truly completed and completed by the writer during her lifetime, first published in an anthology, then published at her own expense by Dolores Prato, after winning a literary prize; anomalous, synthetic and essential object, at the opposite end of the spectrum from other river tests and never really finished, always in progress, construction sites always open. A schoolgirl, tempted to leave the college where she grew up and studied, is at the center of a naturally slim story, which is resolved in about thirty perfect pages, in which there is nothing superfluous. Leaving confinement to choose the world, the nuns-teachers warn, means getting burned, among dangers and temptations. Not only metaphorically, one would say, when the college girl goes to the seaside with her sister and becomes the victim of sunstroke with burns. What has been implemented is a silent but implacable revolution.
Symbolisms and abandonment
Elegant, persuasive, flowing, rich in symbolism, more or less evident, the prose of Burns it is a formidable example of the risk of getting burned and of irony hurled against hypocrisy (represented in particular by a bigoted lay missionary), of transport for life against the aridity of those who advised her against choosing the world, of poetry against nothingness : «I stayed there looking at the stars and the sea, and my joy went between those two things, so slowly, so sweetly that it became peace». It is the beginning of adulthood, of the first important choices, of family discoveries, of a sense of strangeness and abandonment that Dolores Prato will carry throughout her entire existence.
Follow us on Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, Threads, YouTube Facebook and X. Thank you
