Sunday 9 February 2025, 11.00 am at the monumental complex of Santa Maria la Nova in Naples, for the Books&Museum review, the presentation of l'istinto di Lara, by Emilia Tartaglia Polcini, was held. Preface by Maria Cristina Donnarumma (Friend of the Strega Prize Sunday), Graus editions, Naples 2024, 155 pages. This debut novel by Emilia Tartaglia Polcini delves very well, with a pressing rhythm, into the «three main characters» alongside whom «others rotate who cannot be defined as entirely secondary» (from the Preface, page 7); and this not without the additional «protagonist of no secondary importance… nature with its noises, its colors, its scents» (Ibid., page 8).You can see the pen of someone accustomed to short stories and theatrical plays also in this one, which I would define as a coming-of-age novel, whose short and effective chapters, not numbered, follow one another in a compelling way, to make us gradually perceive, so to speak directly, the various aspects of what the title of the book calls, precisely, Lara's instinct. It is, in many respects, the same instinct of her mother Mélanie, who found herself acting as the wife of an unlikely «peacock», her husband, who, despite her presence, was capable of swelling «next to that unlikely companion who was only slightly older than his daughter» (page 54). An instinct that soon leads Lara to be terrified of her father (compare pages 62 and 63), also because he, with his ways and his repeated and shameless betrayals with his “kitten” (page 49), was causing, as we read verbatim, everything to collapse (both relationships and feelings, both passions and hobbies that were not his); all this given the fact, immediately evident, that «his marriage was falling apart» (page 48).The father lives alone, even though he is with his wife, her friend, and his daughter; he is a construction magnate (compare page 115), who can even have non-scheduled flights, but cannot fly higher than his own genitals; but above all, he appears to be taken by his hobbies, as long as they are always lucrative, such as the sparkling wine production of his wine products, which he is promoting even in Japan, that is, "in a country that only in modern times is beginning to open up to the Western culture of wine consumption" (page 115). The short narrative chapters occasionally feature parts printed in italics: they are almost the commentary of a chorus of the ancient Greek theater, in the sense that, periodically, the Author carves out her own spaces: in these lines of writing, she presents her observations on the facts, on the climate, on the environment, on the events, on the souls, on the emotions...; above all, she does so in those lines in which the narrated events give the sense of the few moments - ephemeral!, just as she opens and closes the chapter on pages 37 to 39 - in which some glimmer of happiness seems to make its way on the horizon. Among others, the italicized part of pages 60 to 65, tells, in counterpoint, the real "terror" that Lara has of her father, also because he does not share what he considers, textually, «that stupid activity of ballet» (page 61); this is a characteristic repeated in another passage in italics, where Lara «little by little, towards her father… a real terror had taken shape» (page 63)The world of people and environments evoked by these pages does not belong to the plebs, but to the upper middle class involved in international business and transactions, particularly in the production of the wine industry; we are talking about the Castaldi family of Lomellina, whose exponent - and father of Lara - is, in fact, Filippo Castaldi of Lomellina: a man with a strong weakness for carnal sensuality that, in the plot, leads him to introduce his lover at his wife's birthday party, or even to have her live in the house together with his daughter Lara, in the years in which his wife, following a fall from a horse - which happened after the terrible moment of his betrayal, when she discovers that her husband does not disdain public sentimentality with his lover.By now Lara's mother, despite her very vivid imagination, lives elsewhere in a neurovegetative state. Slave, like a teenager, to the feminine charm of an escort, as when the narration in italics observes that Lara «saw her father Filippo who… accompanied a young woman to the car and like a teenager spent himself in effusions, promising to join her as soon as possible» (page 65). A «vain to the end» (page 152), as the now mature and married Lara will sentence (whose heart a young man finally steals: page 85), in front of her father's tomb, «in the Monumental Cemetery of Milan, where he had been buried after being cremated» (page 152). Even though she belongs to this world, also made up of waiters, housekeepers, business trips throughout Europe or Japan, Lara is a person apart: «she didn't like those parties or even those people... she hated the lack of ...
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