Sasusaku Love Stories

Dark Mirror

What is the "dark mirror"? And 'the image of our guilty conscience? consciousness made unhappy? of unspeakable human drives? It happens that among the Hesperides there are also storytellers. So why not talk about it?

Francescantonio Di Dionisio signature is that many readers have already met on the culture, journalism online. But not only is the author of photographic books and two novels as "The leaking of the identity" and "Eldorado." Born in San Vito in the province of Chieti, Chieti, Genoa is adopted. Suspended between painting and writing, performing arts, in parallel, returns with a collection of stories whose common thread to tie them is the controversial issue of identity. The title of the book "Dark Mirror" is taken from the first epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, XII - 2, published editions "of books Peralto" - Genoa 2010. A sore

Ulysses, disenchanted, former anti-hero than Homer, but also with respect a quello joyciano in fondo assai più picaresco,  è quello che emerge dal primo racconto " Per maligne inestricabili trame " (titolo tratto da un verso dell'Odissea). La sua, in chiave moderna, è la condizione dell'uomo itinerante costretto a peregrinare non già per scoprire con orgoglio avventure ed esperienze inconsuete legate a nuove frontiere, ma per "seguire un'occulta linea fatale, un percorso che potevo solo subire", come egli stesso confesserà alla fanciulla Nausicaa che lo ritrova.


E' ancora la voce delle radici, degli istinti più profondamente ancestrali che arma la mano di Austina, " La Rapita", quando dopo il sequestro di un malvivente che la sottrae al suo focolare domestico e dopo il ritrovamento da parte del suo consorte nella caverna dove è stata nascosta, spara. Ma non già al suo rapitore come sarebbe ovvio, bensì al marito che vuole trarla in salvo. Perché? Forse perché troppo grande sarebbe stata per lei l'onta di tornare a casa da "svergognata"? In questo caso, l'identità è la voce oscura degli antenati e di tradizioni ataviche, cui la donna resta intimamente soggiogata.

"La travestita ",  è, al contrario della precedente, una donna cosiddetta emancipata dei primi del Novecento dall'identità labile  che copia l'ambiente in cui si muove, attraversa deserti che sono dei labirinti without end, dresses as a man, smoking, drinking, sexual promiscuity to practice self-destruction.

Narrated in first person, is tender and moving "The Ugly Duckling " where the author performs a reverse narrative (but similar) to that of Morante in the 'Island of Arthur ": identify adolescent Viviana , as well as incorporated in the boy Arturo Morante. Penetrating only with great sensitivity in mind and the body of this anorexic girl who denies the mirror to see themselves not "bad," you can describe the fears, anxieties, insecurities of the rites of passage, leaving forever behind childhood in a metamorphosis that can not be painless. The ugly duckling eventually becomes, yes, a beautiful swan, but the ending will not be so comforting fairy tale, as other tough battles ahead for the teenager who becomes a woman. After all, life is eternal initiation: it is a bit 'This is the moral of the story.

Finally, " Dark Mirror," the story that gives the title to the entire collection. Story of two "inseparable" twin violinists, who pursue the myth of their strength and invincibility, swapping roles in study, work, in which women share. Here the theme of nineteenth-century and disturbing the "double" ( doppelgaenger) rolled over in a modern not only in the dualism es / ego, self and other, but as a partial identity and halved together in a mechanical symbiosis, through which it will attempt a revanche social, psychological and sentimental. The end will be tragic and devastating for both, since the authors of a heinous crime, they are forced to undergo this symbiotic association more and more like a straitjacket. No coincidence that the term "individual" (Latin for "individuum", that is indivisible, unique, not repeatable) shows us that no two drops of water in the end, are identical. Our life is personal, unique and precious and none is given to relive it "by proxy". Even in monozygotic twins.
(above: the film poster David Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers" addressing the issue of twinning ).

Hesperia