Gooseberry, the beautiful and lost boy

«Uvaspina» (Bompiani) by Monica Acito breaks the mold of contemporary Italian fiction and draws heavily on that baroque reservoir of styles and images of the Neapolitan tradition that ranges from Basile to Moscato. A full, rich, exuberant language, made up of neologisms and dialectal voices, to tell the modern tale of the young and handsome boy, with a birthmark under his eye, called by everyone Gooseberry. The young man, who loves Di Giacomo’s poems and the sea, is the predestined victim of his sister Minuccia, a “strummolo” capable of overwhelming those close to her with her fury. In general, however, brother and sister are both disoriented boys, each in their own way, who find themselves living on the edge of good Naples, children of a high-ranking father and a mother who cried at funerals for a living, called the Spaiata. Her husband falls in love with her because “La Spaiata was different from those people of the latrine, she was forcellara and peasant, woodland and city, spontaneous as the sea decorated by the foam, chatterbox who had taught him to cry and laugh for the first time”. Up to a certain point in the novel, it is precisely the mother figure who dominates the narrative: an overflowing, excessive woman, animated by an untiring faith in the magic of the night of San Giovanni and in other marvels of Neapolitan popular culture. Monica Acito’s Naples is a city crossed by chthonic forces, which exudes moods and smells, but also the bearer of an inexhaustible vitality. And when you least expect it, a wild and luminous creature emerges like the fisherman Antonio, known by Uvaspina on the beach of Palazzo Donn’Anna. «Antonio talked and laughed too much, his words seemed made of water and fish bones». On the other hand, there is the city of circles and hypocrisy, of fake gentlemen and retouched women: «Portio’s godmother was one of those women who had once been beautiful, and her beauty had remained resting on her little wrinkles around the lips, like a nostalgic veil that shone only against the light». Similarly, Naples can produce in those who love it this nostalgic feeling for its “lost harmony”, which only literature can restore.