Teacher and journalist, he introduces him to the Bonanzinga bookshop
MESSINA – Simona Moraci is a journalist and teacher from Messina. After “Two hundred days of storm” and “L’eterno”, for Marlin publisher, you have just published your new novel, set in Messina in the nineties: “Like fish on the rocks” by Simona Moraci, for Morellini publisher. In the foreground the story of two teenagers.
The author presents it today, at 7pm, at the Bonanzinga bookshop, in dialogue with the superintendent Stello Vadalà. Reservation required at the bookshop.
The story of “Like fish on rocks”
Messina, 1998. Save attends the fifth year of scientific high school. The son of a fisherman, a violent man who torments him and his mother, he is teased and harassed by a small group of companions, among whom Luca stands out. Chiara, in her third year, has a family that loves her and dreams of being a writer.
Chiara and Save start dating after a chance clash and a chance meeting in the physics laboratory. Between the sweetness of a blossoming love, the first experiences and the whirlwind of adolescent emotions, Chiara finds herself entangled in a situation bigger than herself. She, together with her friend Tilde, gets involved with Luca and his friends, and in one afternoon everything degenerates.
This sets in motion a series of events that will change the fate of all the kids involved, linked by a single thread that develops through “knots” of time. A tribute to the Austrian physicist Schrödinger and his theory which is the pivot and leitmotif of the entire novel.
“The restless lives of my students inspired me”
Simona Moraci explains: “As a young girl, Schrödinger’s theory, according to which the cat in the box can be both alive and dead at the same time, made me dream. The coexistence of two universes, the idea that time could be broken, seemed to me the most fascinating of fairy tales. Today, when I am distant from that adolescence, I experience the restless age of my students, of those who grow up in the difficult neighborhoods where I have been teaching for several years now. This paradox, freely interpreted, serves as the narrative structure of the novel, and takes us into the lives of two Sicilian teenagers of the nineties, Chiara and Save”.
And again: “Save, on the threshold of maturity, has a history of abuse and feels the stench of misery and evil sticking to his skin. He feels it in the rejection of others, in the ferocity of his companions who call him the “fisherman”, because he is the son of a fisherman. Chiara, in her third year, has a family that loves her and is cradled by the affection of her father and grandmother. Her approach to reality is dreamy, made of words, naive. Their lives, so distant, meet and intertwine, in the discovery of love and in the escape from pain. The novel comes alive through violent experiences, which are not only those of the suburbs, but also of the upper middle class. Adults are often perceived as ghosts who, for better or worse, whisper in the protagonists’ ears, guiding their choices. And such choices become “knots”, fractures of a reality that is often difficult to accept in which love remains the only force capable of regenerating the universe”.
