There was a period even too far in which we began to breathe the smell of stale: always the same voices with few original ideas, poor desire to get involved, perhaps, trust in the debutants reduced to the light (which then who buys them The books of strangers or semi-unknown?). Today the wind has changed pleasantly, and a small Renaissance is glimpsed on the horizon in the Italian literary panorama. Next to the certainties and long -time writers – who cannot and must be missing for heaven’s sake -, there are many debutants or semi -flakes, mostly young people, but not necessarily. And many are good, but really good. Among these, I like to think that Eleonora Daniel could become, from here, a recognized and recognizable voice. Certainly his debut in the world of the novel, The dust you breathe was a housepublished by Bollati Boringhieri, certifies three peculiarities: it has ideas, has quality, has courage.

He does not choose the simple ways to make his debut, you already guess from the title – which knows of destruction – and from the cover, that it was not for the bright colors would also put in difficulty those who do not suffer from claustrophobia (the illustration of Francesca Protopapa, however,, it’s beautiful). But the novel begins with an aura that is anything but gloomy: it is the story of a couple like many others, of those who arise, grow, make important projects, the wedding, the house. It is like the apartment that he and she buy on paper, which see growing from the construction site that “resembles an Egyptian necropolis”, and which slowly takes on a form and content. It is the love story of an ‘us’ rather than a ‘I and you’, splendidly rendered by the author with a mixture, in the narrative, of the first person plural and third singular, even within the same sentence . A stylistic choice, but also content, strong and risky, but certainly winning. It can be a little alienating at the beginning, but does not create obstacles to understanding. A stylistic choice that makes writing not only form, but also content.

The beautiful love story, as indeed many other beautiful love stories, at some point transforms, leaves room for problems, difficulties, undergoing progressive erosion. Then there is a lightning bolt that triggers the storm. It is at this point that Daniel digs in anguish, fears and nightmares, and does it with a drumming, sinusoidal prose, with peaks of pathos. He is not afraid of experimenting and folding conventions to make, from a linguistic point of view, feelings and sensations. At times it becomes bold, then returns to the borders of a more cautious and reassuring prose, and then explodes suddenly, displacing the reader, as on page 163:

Arrival arrival arrival arrival (…) cursing yourself to put back your three things washed underpants in the backpack including arrival arrival the book The book The notebook now printed in the notebook do not sleep off the alarm clock cursed new arrival arrival (… … )

Daniel makes extensive use of the accumulation, does it with or without punctuation, depending on the speed he wants to give to the narrative and intensity and urgency of the feelings and sensations he wants to express. A result that also achieves the most classic of dialogical settings, using (but not always) the free indirect discourse. He is not afraid of touching ferocious climax by shape and content (we always return there, on the shape and content):

There are parents who torture their children. There are parents who rape their children, who beat their children, who let them drown in the vomiting, who suffocate them, who strangle them, who kill them

Be careful, however, not to confuse The dust you breathe was a house for an exercise in style. Because the prose flows, sometimes it is like a river in flood that overwhelms everything that compares itself forward. And in the same way the narrato of Eleonora Daniel overwhelms the reader, who cannot remain impassive and participates in the pain of the two protagonists. Some passages in particular make anguish grow, and it is precisely in those points that there is no way to detach from reading. You want to continue, go further, you feel like the illustration on the cover: stuck in the suffering of the protagonists, who at a certain point is made of the reader, as in a bottleneck, in search of a way out. To hope for a certain type of epilogue.

The maximum aspiration of a writer should be the identification of the reader in his protagonists. Eleonora Daniel succeeds in full, and is not obvious to the debut novel.