the luminous novel of a wait – Corriere.it

In a 1977 article titled Against painPrimo Levi wrote: it is difficult for every man to reduce as much as he can the tremendous amount of this “substance” that pollutes every life, pain in all its forms. Literature is part of the medicines capable of helping that difficult task which coincides with the life of each of us, because, as we know, it is inevitable that every life knows pain.

Ada d’Adamo probably knew it too when she decided to tell her pain. The epigraph that she wanted to put before her novel says it, signed by Rita Charon, medical internist and literary essayist: it is necessary to tell her pain to escape her dominion over her. Ada’s pain is only apparently double. Only apparently because the pain of having given birth to a wonderful imperfect daughter to which is added the pain of carrying a disease that is very difficult to heal is not a pain more than another pain: a pain squared, irresistible. A pain that knows it has to deal with the sense of the inexorable abandonment of a sick daughter.

If the potential dancer that was Ada became a writer, we can therefore imagine (to hope) that it was of some use. Not always, but there are extreme cases in which literature is useful, to those who write it and to those who read it: that is the only space that remains accessible, as Philippe Forest wrote in a book that recounted his daughter’s death, All children except one.

Here is a good strategy against pain. But a book about pain is a successful book when it is also full of happiness. And when you open the page, you understand that Like air
a book that radiates happiness. From the incipit: You are Daria. You are of air. The apostrophe transforms you into a light and impalpable substance. It happens in certain books that tell unsustainable stories, like Forest’s or Joan Didion’s, The year of magical thinkingin which the American writer recounted her husband’s illness and then her mourning.

Here in Like air, there is something even more unbearable that increases the little miracle of that happiness of style and lightness: waiting. Not only waiting times, waiting lists, waiting rooms that we find everywhere: we now know that the book itself was a waiting book.

Ada d’Adamo died, two days after entering the Dozen of the Witch. No rhetoric, please. Only a mocking fatality could arrange the events as if it had waited for the news before leaving. There are two winners of the Strega prize in death so far: in 1959 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who had suffered a lot before not seeing published The Leopard and all the clamorous and unexpected success that followed; and Maria Teresa Di Leave, who died in 1994 and won the following year with the beautiful Passage in the shadereleased posthumously.

Unlike Tomasi and Di Doccia, Ada d’Adamo was able to see his book. See for the prize. Words are beings sensitive to pain, wrote Elias Canetti. Certainly not sensitive to prizes.