Terradimandorla's "Divento di Vento"

A collection of very well written, very literary stories. They range from science fiction to the dreamlike, passing through the surreal. Illustrated with decomposed, almost liquid drawings in pastel colours. Terradimandorla, pseudonym of Cristina Basile, an expat author hovering between France and Sicily, writes and paints them.

Women (but not only) protagonists of stories that are difficult to tell, transfiguring and transfigured, where an alteration is taking place. Change doesn't even scare us anymore since it is inevitable, we let ourselves go to its disorganizing action, we become "wind", in turn bearers of mutation.

Stories that are also raw, excruciating, hard to digest, told as if nothing had happened, without apparent pathos but with a lot of underlying tension. Orphaned girls, missing fathers, violent men, current events. Characters and plots that start in one way and reveal themselves to be completely different, time that flows in alienating leaps, places that take on archetypal meanings, such as the Fontanelle cemetery in Naples or the tuna fishery in Favignana. The simplest, most everyday events, such as being a babysitter or wearing a dress with a bow, take on fantastic meanings, delve into the unconscious, transform into concepts which are understandable more with intuition than with reason, imbued with repressed sexuality or violence. They bring with them the need to "dissolve in the water", free oneself, "disappear to oneself", as the author herself states, explaining the instinct that led her to leave her homeland.

A studied style, weighed words, chosen from a thousand to create a non-immediate comparison which is already a metaphor in itself. A prose so characterized as to become hermetic poetry, perhaps more to be accepted than understood.

In the midst of so much escapist fiction, every now and then we feel the need for refined readings like this.