'OF OCHER AND COBALT' by GIULIANA SARTI

“But there was a painting of his, revealing, in the sad years lived by Miguel, a painting of large proportions, with black and cobalt background, bunches of fire instead of disappeared stars, leafless black and burnt trees, and in the center the menino, the child, sharp angles the shoulders, sharp angles his closed hands tight on his chest, empty eyes and black orbits, crosses everywhere and from far, like memories, fleeting dreamlike appearances, a woman lowering her head on her child in a protecting and loving gesture. Naked trees like begging hands. Almost immaterial, small and defenseless in the big crash of death, in war and abandonment, the crianca, the innocent creature has to be the symbol, an oniric and moral totem.'

'Of ocher and cobalt' is Giuliana Sarti's (www.servizi-per-editoria.it)fourth literary prowess. When one succeeds in making Beauty palpable, it is not easily discussed. Writing an autobiographical novel like one paints a picture. The word like colour. The word used on the paper like pigmented paste on watercolor, until the contours differentiating them disappear.

The Author is inside the word and maneuvers it in a refined way. This is the book of words and colours which appear to each other in uncertain traits, lost in a confused and trembling horizon similar to that of the Sahara immersed in a cloud of fire red sand.

Sarti paints with her writing and her pen is a mastered brush giving life to words that incarnate wild emotions.

It is unclear whether a word is simply this or a scratch of spatula on a palette or Edith Piaf's voice or the freeze frame of a crowded street of Sao Paolo or a dusty African village, or simply, one of the bricks of a magnificent architectural work.

'Of ocher and cobalt' is a placid lake violently burst into by a rock thrown, a walk on a soft carpet which mutates into pins and then into nails, or the fragrance of a bright red flower which first emanates a delicate scent of honey, then to sting unexpectedly the sense of smell of the reader with a pungent and penetrating aroma.

'Of ocher and cobalt' is a tireless flux of energy, it is a coming and going, a walking up steps with not enough rungs to descend them.

From an undecipherable place, we hear the melancholy rhythms of Bossa Nova and the sounds which will escape the pages take the reader by the hand to dance a batucada.

It is a roaming book, Dario's incessant peregrination while his beloved wife Maria wanders uninterruptedly along arduous paths of the soul that no one is able to scrutinize.

A Leopardian touch inebriates of immensity the subjugated eyes by words which do not lock but are locked into infinite spaces, like the large Amazon forests or the stylized and icy Brazilia. From the magnificent tapestry of adjectives and syntactic games emerge Dario, Maria, Bruno, Lele and Miguel, like a painting whose perspective sharpens always more violently until it spills out of the frame like a bas relief: their feelings, emotions and moods, first feeble and suffused like the amber and gentle light of a little Shakespearean study, invade the narration without any more care for anyone, skinless, disembodied in their most brutal authenticity in the dusk of the story, disallowing any saudade, any melancholia, any sadness and defeat.

As Sartre would say, the gardenia is a flower which embellishes Maria's garden, or maybe it is the flower decorating Maria's hair, or better still, it is a word which becomes a scarlet stain which changes into a flower or in reality it is nothing but a voluminous gardenia which assumes the form of a word to adorn with flora the whole story.

Characters who delicately stride and move across the pages to reveal their Hellenic tragicity only at the end. The word which, shape shifting and polymorphous, flowers in architecture and music and dance and painting and sculpture as impenetrable as it is vigorous, but also in floral ornaments; a plot which, positioned at first on the background of the stage, suddenly leaps to the foreground with a furrowing brow.

Prose takes poetry in its arms in an indistinguishable embrace. Immaculate pages that invade the space to lend it the meaning of a death that cannot be pushed back anymore, of a resigned fatality, of a destiny one cannot oppose anymore, of solitude heavy with a love as dense as clotted blood, of an irrevocable desire to return to an ethereal form.

Is it the old man asleep who dreams of having become a yellow butterfly, asks Branduardi 'the finder' to himself, or is it the yellow butterfly which dreams of being an old man asleep at the roots of a tree?

To immerse oneself in a sea of literature to drown in it: how sweet this abandonment in signs tainted in ink 'of a sky imprisoned in wire'!

'The everyday is the foundation on which we walk and the people we love are those who save us and lead us to destruction. We are always accompanied by a loneliness we ignore, by a love we do not fully know.'

Fabrizio Giulimondi