What remains in the ashes

What are and how great are the stages of suffering of a family, of a Father and a Mother, due to the loss of their children in a fire? There is no single answer, but Michele Ruol – a doctor by profession, but an experienced theater screenwriter – tries to outline an itinerary of suffering starting from what is left among the ashes: objects – in common use, perhaps of no importance in everyday life – which in the tragedy take on the value of the tomb, of the place of memory and which, by giving the name to each chapter, almost seem to keep alive those who are no longer there.

The children, Major and Minor, have disappeared. Just like everything human can remain in a half family, in which Father and Mother (we will always know them like this throughout the novel) have the involuntary task of making an inventory of what is left among the smoking remains. Including their lives.

A journey backwards

A backward path, the one traced by Ruol, where page after page – alternating a “memoire” with a present from which it is impossible to escape – the emotional tension rises (but also the inspiration, the participation, the solidarity for those who are suffering) for the lives that are no longer there, both those who died in that tragic accident, and for the other deaths drowned in a flow that suddenly lost all horizons of meaning. To disappear, then, after a tragedy whose dimension emerges from any geometry existential (and this is incredibly true even when leaving the pages of this novel), it is also the couple that atomizes, becoming the sum of two single units and no longer a whole. Because pain, when it takes the place of love as the glue of a family, of a marriage, turns into resentment; a sensation which as the only possible outcome produces “a schism” in the couple.

Even if this very state of permanent aggression is – unconsciously – something that keeps you alive, a form of communication that keeps certain emotional taps open and that anchors you to life even when you just want to drift away.

Solidarize with those who suffer

The narrative register chosen by the author is beautiful, the alternation of temporal planes, the descriptions of the present and the past “from which there is no escape”. A writing that leaves no escape for the reader who can only sympathize with those who suffer, wondering – almost as if it were a ritual of “secular superstition” – what he would have done in the protagonists’ place.