Set between Trieste, Istria and Bosnia, “La mia casa altro”, published by Bottega Errante, marks the debut of Federica Marzi from Trieste as a novel, a story with noir overtones that begins with a car accident in Istria. The victim, fortunately only injured and not particularly seriously, is a Bosnian girl, Amila, now living in Trieste, who had borrowed the Panda, without asking its rightful owner, Norina, an exile from Buie, the woman who helps out at home to look after her sick husband, Mariano. Norina, not seeing the car return to its place, could have thought it was a theft, but soon, alerted by the police of the accident and rushing from Trieste to the hospital in Isola, where Amila was admitted, she will have the opportunity to clarify with her. But she won't succeed, not there, not entirely, at least about the reasons why she had to stealthily take the car.

And it is from here that, in practice, the story begins, which, through the individual destinies of its protagonists, with the flashback technique, will lead us to the larger ones, of the peoples, who, let's not forget, are all made up of single people, each, in fact, with their own destiny, different from the other. In this case, the lives, the destinies of Norina and Amila, are framed in the broader context of the two wars that most upset the countries on the eastern border of Italy, that is, the Second World War, as far as Istria is concerned, and the inter-ethnic Yugoslav war that upset the former Yugoslavia, in particular, Bosnia, for Amila. In this sense, both Norina and Amila have in common the escape, because of their respective wars, from their different lands of origin, with all the consequences, in this case, common: the first shelter in a refugee camp, for Norina and her family, her father, her mother and her sister Nevia, in that of Padriciano near Trieste and for Amila and her family in Jesolo, and then Amila with her father Željko, her mother Selma and her sister Majda also arrived in Trieste, where she studied, while her father, a former professor, was involved in the migrants' union.

But, despite the diversity of their biographies, conditions, generations, distant from each other, despite the diversity of their wars, something, or rather, someone, will unite them, uniting with his person both wars that have marked the destinies of Norina and Amila. And we will discover this, following the reasons that led Amila to stealthily take Norina's car to go to Istria, but which we avoid telling because the novel consists precisely in a sort of montage, thanks to which, little by little, we will come to know the whole story.

We will limit ourselves to saying that the driving force of the whole affair will be Simon, one of Nevia's Australian nephews, and therefore Norina's great-nephew, to whom Nevia writes asking her to host him for a while in her house. It's not that Norina is enthusiastic about it, because she has it in for her sister Nevia who, in her time, we're talking about the early 70s, without telling her family or, much less, her sister, had emigrated to Australia, as in those years XNUMX thousand Julian exiles would go overseas, not only to Australia, but to the United States, Canada, South Africa, even Brazil (I would like to make an aside on this: a beautiful book by Rosanna Turcinovich Giuricin has just been published, entitled "Exiles twice - from their own home, from their own homeland" with an introductory essay by the historian Roberto Spazzali, published by Oltre Edizioni, which deals with this very subject, editor's note). Returning to Federica Marzi's novel, we discover that with Nevia, Franco Radoni, known as Bacan, also left Trieste, because he used to make noise with his gestures and proclamations, and not just any man, but the young man with whom Norina herself was in love, without ever having the courage to give in to him as he would have wanted and had made her understand. And what a disappointment, what a great disappointment it was for Norina to discover that her sister Nevia had left on the same ship, on the same journey, undertaken by Franco Rodoni, a circumstance that had made her understand of a relationship between the two, of which her sister had kept her in the dark. Not only that. She will later find out that Nevia had also had a daughter with him, even if in the end she would marry another man, Carmine, with whom she had other daughters, while she and Mariano were left without. Apart from that, that rancor in her had never subsided, and she was then content to marry, precisely, the good-natured Mariano.

Everything, therefore, makes Norina hostile to the sudden arrival of her great-grandson, and her sister, sensing it, fearing for that wrong from the past, tries to appease her in the letter: “We're old as the hills. Let's get our things in order, will you?? But Nevia shouldn't have said that (…) Norina threw the papers on the table impatiently. The chatter her sister was filling her head with was like nettles: irritating”. Also because Norina suspects that Simon is, as he actually is, Franco Bacan's nephew.

But then, thinking about it, yes, she agrees to host him. “Because Simon was Nevia’s first and foremost. And he didn’t want anything from his sister. Things between the two of them could never get back on track.”

With the flashback we are always in the moments before the accident. And Norina's story alternates with that of Alima, her family, their house in Zvornik on the border between Bosnia and Serbia, with all the problems that come with it, due to the fact that there, the good coexistence between ethnic groups of the past - and she was Bosniak - had ended, and even in Trieste her daily school life was strewn with ethnic and linguistic problems that pushed her to change schools, even against her father's advice. Situations that have the merit of giving human depth to her figure, that depth that will lead her to take Norina's car and cross the border to Dragon, to then end up against a truck.

But, before all this, there is the arrival of Simon, there is Amila who acts as his guide, there is the love between the two and there is also a trip to the hometown of Simon's grandmother, Norina and Franco Radoni called Bacan. Together, Simon and Amila will discover that the old man has returned to the village and ask about his house, they go there, but when they arrive it is closed. "What did you think, eh!" Amila tells him "Did you think you could arrive on any day and find your grandfather right in his old house, in a ghost town?". So they return to Trieste. Then Simon, however, has to return to Australia, not without first passing through Greece where he has a friend waiting for him, he leaves... Amila tries to stay in touch with him, trusting in his return. In the meantime, however, the girl discovers by chance, reading a Croatian-language newspaper, a news item, that there is a certain Franjo Radonic, "owner of a trucking company, founded together with a certain Danko Burić, businessman, politician and then general of the Croatian army, a prominent figure in the war of independence" against whom the International Court of The Hague had issued an extradition warrant a year earlier etc. etc. But immediately a suspicion arises in Amila, of that Franjo Radonić, the suspicion that Franco or Francesco Radoni and Franjo (Francesco in Croatian) Radonic are the same person... so she wants to check. And all alone she returns to the hometown of Norina, Nevia, Franjo... We leave the reader to enjoy accompanying Amila in this discovery.

All in all, a good debut, this one by Federica Marzi, even if the timing of the action seems perhaps a little too dilated, caressed as the pages are – 326 are really a little too many in this case – by the author's desire to put in so many aspects and materials that urge her inside, but that end up making, in the end, the reading slower than it deserves. But I believe that with time, given the good result, the good Federica Marzi will know better how to hold back and let herself go.

Diego Zandel
Source: Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa – 31/03/2022