Maruzza Musumeci, Andrea Camilleri

by Alessandro Vitali

a brief novel, that soundsad enchant as a fable.

As, among the others, in The king of Girgenti, in this new story Camilleri dips him in the past of his land, Sicily, that was already of Verga and Pirandello, making her to us vivid through the usual and strongly dialect language, dense of music and rhythm, that is transformed in odors, colors, magic and strong feelings, instinctives, lived with an inevitability and a naturalness typically farmer. In a dimension that is not that of today's reality, but of a distant and mythical ancestral universe in which all could happen.

Also that Gnazio, child of laborers, immigrated in America then returned to his land, with a deep and instinctive fear for the sea could fall in love and decide to spend all of his life with Maruzza, a woman for half siren and surrounded of a dark atmosphere, as a witch.

And as happens in the most classical fables, Camilleri wants to communicate one “moral”, if the author allows this term. A complex moral and at the same time flood of poetry, what directly touches the ropes of the emotion.

The narration of the life of Gnazio and of his family, in fact, if from a side is introduced with continuous references to the typical circularity of a country reality in which a lot of part in the decision of the destinies of the protagonists is submitted to external strengths in the furrow of the classical logic of the defeated ones, what lives the great changes of the first half of the past century suffering them and without any possibility of protagonism, to engrave somehow, uprooted from that logic of progress that seems almost not to graze them, despite, particularly the child Cola which will become an astronomer from adult, they live inside this reality. From the other side in the simplicity with which it is lived and in the liberty, we could almost affirm aware emancipation, with which the choices that the destiny allows them to do are taken, return us the figure of characters which, perhaps more than in today's reality, they end up assuming a stature, a sort of active in the stories that they cross, that they live in first person.  

And here that then it also becomes possible that two so opposite souls, as a being of “ground”, Grazio, and a being of ”water”, Maruzza, can meet, love, and respect each other in the understanding of the mutual differences, for the whole life. And besides, the different roads that their children Cola and Resina, Calorio and Ciccina,  will pick up, all strongly imbued by a harmony and naturalness able to surprise the reader.

In short, a moral for our society in which the different one is immediately shown, made guilty only for the fact to originate from a distant place or to have the skin of another color. A society that perhaps in her technology and in her progress has returned as for very back level of awareness and culture in comparison to her real perception. A criticism to the new madium age feared to the doors of which Camilleri has, as in a thread that ties a lot of part of his works, always clearly convict the violence and the lack of sense (in the respect of the lesson of the two writers from him perhaps mostly beloved, Sciascia and Pirandello).