A novel about the traumatic end of childhood

Black September, by Sandro Veronesi (Florence, 1959), is a coming-of-age novel, but above all it is a novel about the traumatic end of childhood. For the protagonist, Gigio Bellandi, son of an archetypically Italian criminal lawyer (a good guy with worldly vitality) and an exuberant Irish mother (fair-skinned and red-haired) with a much stronger character than she appears, the summer of 1972, which like every year he spent in a small town on the Tuscan coast with his parents and younger sister, marked a before and after in his life. He was twelve years old then, and now that he is sixty he remembers it in great detail. Not until the last pages will we know exactly what happened to him, but from the beginning we will be clear that that decisive summer represented for Gigio the best and the worst of life: the beginning of becoming a man through the fullness of reciprocal love and seeing how his whole small paradise world was shattered by the selfishness and weaknesses of the adults.Considering the plot materials it is made of, Setembre negre, translated into Catalan by Pau Vidal with the very vivid rigor he has accustomed us to, could have been a short novel –quick, agile, condensed and intense–, but it is noticeable that, in addition to telling a story, the author has also wanted to reconstruct a world and an era, that of his pre-adolescent Italy (sports idols, summer routines, musical discoveries), and for this reason the novel is long, detailed, with meanders, always lively but, at times, narratively ceremonial. This narrative and formal option may be a bit wordy in some passages, but in the long run it adds dramatic force to the climax. It also gives the work as a whole that sediment of humble but transcendent wisdom that springs from deeply examined and meticulously distilled experience.A man who remembers, a voice that tells

Two are the main virtues of Black September. The first is the tone of the narrative voice, evocative without nostalgic complacency, reflective in a passionate and robust way. It is a persuasive and warm voice that makes everything it explains interesting, whether it invents pastimes and sun-and-beach routines or reproduces cataclysmic conversations spied on in secret. It is the immense power of literature when it is, purely and simply, a character who remembers and a voice that tells. The second virtue is a gallery of memorable supporting characters: the well-matched marriage of the parents; Astel Raimondi, the girl with whom Gigio discovers the complete happiness of first love; Astel's parents; the anarchist uncle and his example of dignity and resistance; Gigio's discreet and wonderful little sister... They are supporting characters who complement and enrich the protagonist without ever being subordinate to him.In a novel in which for almost three hundred pages the revelation of an exceptionally dramatic event is announced and postponed, there is a risk of not satisfying expectations. This is not the case with Black September: the final revelation and the mix of subtlety and explosiveness with which Veronesi recounts it are admirable and totally effective. The lesson – let's call it a lesson – of it all, moreover, is wise and resonates with great force, and speaks to us, implicitly, of the fatal error of resentment and the heroic feat of forgiveness.