The fourth novel to be included in the top five selected by the jury of literary figures of the Campiello Prize, Soul by Federica Manzon passionately interweaves history and geography in a narrative thread that looks to the past and the present as its reflection, scrupulously investigating the events of the ‘border peoples’, of Tito’s Yugoslavia – seen through the naive eyes of someone who was only a child at the time -, of its disintegration and of the war conflicts in the Balkans in the first half of the Nineties.

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Everything is seen through the eyes of Alma, a journalist transplanted to the capital, who returns for three days to Trieste, the city of her childhood from which she fled to start a new life elsewhere. Her visit to the Julian capital is the opportunity to collect the unexpected legacy left to her by her father, a man without roots, accustomed to living his life in an elusive way, “who came and went beyond the border”, the one that separates Trieste and the Carso on one side, and on the other the Balkan peninsula, and in particular “the island”, the Brioni archipelago in Istrian territory, former president Tito’s favorite place for his holidays. It is precisely in the shadow of the ‘marshal’ that Alma’s father carries out his mysterious profession.

In Trieste, Alma reconnects with the threads of her past. She finds the house on the avenue of plane trees, where she spent her childhood thanks to her maternal grandparents, guardians of the Central European tradition, of cultured and worldly cafés. She finds the house on the Carso, where the family suddenly moved and where Vili, the son of two intellectuals from Belgrade who were friends of her father, arrived. It is precisely from the hands of Vili, who entered her life from one day to the next, that Alma must receive her father’s inheritance. But Vili is the last person she would like to see again.

Manzon talks about the personal past and that of a community, he immerses himself in the history of an entire people, and he does so by delicately looking out and immersing himself in the concepts of home and belonging. In his novel he chooses to give a universal meaning to the roots and memory that the protagonist’s father considered “overvalued”, and he does so with a precise stylistic choice, that of not giving names to places. Trieste becomes “the City”, Brioni becomes “the island”, and so Rome “the Capital”. After all, Alma was first a young woman, and now a woman, uprooted, who lives and frequents places, but always feels like a foreigner, even in what was her home. She is a woman aware of the origins of her maternal family, accustomed to comforts, acquaintances and places that do not reflect, ultimately, her ideals, and who knows almost nothing about her father, his history and where he comes from.

Manzon creates a historical and geographical essay ‘disguised’ as a novel. Between the pages he sows events perhaps unknown (or little known) to most, which require study and further investigation. Soul it is a spur to recover awareness and knowledge of what the war in the Balkans was in the nineties of the last century, too underestimated on this side of the border: a conflict on multiple scenarios that was genocide, rape as a weapon of destruction and ethnic cleansing, trafficking in arms and drugs.