To celebrate 50 years from the first publication, Rizzoli proposes a re -edition of the Nano to the life written by the journalist. But in the “press” the work is presented as a manifesto pro interruption of pregnancy
It is a futile exercise but, above all, unjust to pull the writers for the jacket, pretend to have fully understood the meaning of their works, arrogate the right to establish what they say or do not really say. At the same time, contradiction and beauty of art, the works are not the authors and do not belong totally to them. When they go to the world, they expose themselves fatally to the interpretations, they are in some way influenced by the reception of the public, critics and the whole company or of the companies to come. Each reads in books what he wants to read you, in a constant game between his own sensitivity and that of the Creator. This also happens because the literary works, and sometimes even the essays and pamphlets, are a tapestry, a compound of nuances, a melting messenger that can even be in antithesis: after all, so the human mind works and the heart is no different.
A significant example of the complexity we are talking about is Letter to an never born child Of Oriana Fallaci. It was released for the first time in 1975 and, to celebrate its fifty years, Rizzoli has sent a very well -kept new edition to the bookstore, which is worth getting mainly for those who had never leafed through the work, whose explosive potential is still intact today. In fact, when it came out, that volume caused a deflagration. “From a woman to all women” was dedicated, the monologue of a mother who turns to the son who first felt and learned of having on his lap and who will then lose after having decided to give birth.
As he rightly remembers Lucia Annunziata in the introduction, the Letter It was disruptive because on the one hand it was a fair claim of the autonomy of the woman, of the female power also concerning the ability to generate and, after all, to decide on life and death. But, at the same time, it was also an amazing attestation of vital force, the concrete demonstration of the miracle of nascent life who knew how to wrap and conquer a combative and very determined woman like the Oriana. There was material for everyone: for feminists and for Catholics, for the lay people and for the critics of abortion. It is no coincidence that that book has become, over the years, an essential reading in the pro -life field and to be seen. Because it is true that Oriana was the protagonist of a memorable television debate in which the scene was taken (sometimes by slightly crossing the measure) and kept the conductor head and the various men present reiterating the ineluctability of female self -determination. And it is also true that the Fallaci At the end of the seventies, what he called “Catholic dogma” could not bear. However, the text of the Letterwhich is crystal clear and represents one of the most suffered, passionate and moving defenses of the life of all times (and that irony in the fact that she wrote it).
There is that phenomenal incipit: “I learned that there was: a drop of life escaped from nothing. I was with my eyes wide open in the dark and suddenly, in that darkness, a flash of certainty was turned on: yes, there were. You existed. It was like feeling hit in her chest from a shot. My heart stopped. And when he started beating with deaf thuds, amazing cannonate, I realized that I fall into a well where everything was uncertain and terrifying ».
Go to explain all this with the calculation of the weeks, go to say that the Fallaci He was talking about “a lump of cell”. And then there is all the following: the initial refusal of motherhood, the fierce struggle almost against the very concept of pregnancy. Finally, that Marian choice to say yes, to surrender to the spring life. The stubbornness in keeping the child even if everyone removes elsewhere and suggests more and, finally, the pain for pregnancy suddenly died. Then those lines that seem like a manifesto: «I fear nothing, not being there, having to say that I have not been there, albeit by chance, albeit by mistake, albeit for the distraction of others. Many women ask themselves: get a child into the world, why? Why is he hungry, why is he cold, why is he betrayed and offended, why do you die killed in war or by a disease? And they deny the hope that his hunger will be satiated, that his cold will be heated, that loyalty and respect will be friends, who live for a long time to try to erase diseases and war. Maybe they are right. But is nothing to prefer to suffer? I even in the breaks in which I plan on my failures, my disappointments, my strokes, I conclude that suffering is to prefer to do nothing. And if I widen this to life, to the dilemma born or not to be born, I end up exclaiming that being born is better not to be born ». If it is not a hymn …
Yet of all this there is no trace in the new preface to the Letter signed by Francesca Mannocchi and published a couple of days ago also by Press. The half fake news is mentioned according to which in Molise it could not be aborted due to excess of conscientious objectors, the same objectors are stigmatized, it is suggested that the dignity of women is not respected in Italy and elsewhere, the reasons for euthanasia are vilatedly supported. But not even half a word to celebrate the power with which Oriana’s voice reaffirms the beauty and the need for life. It seems that we cannot speak of this, that those veins in which the Fallaci The abortic rhetoric is dismantled to be deleted, so that only the left -wing icon that she herself, from Viva, had demolished from Tuscany. It almost seems that you want to present Letter to an never born child Like the opposite of what it is, that you want to amend it and locked up in a cage. It is granted badly of the objectors to remove the freedom to object to them while the Fallaci which refuses the abortion better sweetening it, better to divert the attention, that you never know.
Writing Francesca Mannocchi: «More than a monologue, Letter to an never born child It is a conversation. Among the nameless woman who claims her place in the world, in society, in the upside down pyramid of values and its most restless, intense, lucid, tormented part. A woman aware of her freedom and the price she involves exercising her ». We allow ourselves to disagree: it is a conversation between a woman and her child. What the Fallaci He wanted but who was not born and she was so stubborn that he made it common to live, at least on paper.
