Valentina Durante is a freelance copywriter and communication consultant. Since 2019 he has been collaborating with Giulio Mozzi's Storytelling Workshop.
He has published: La proibizione (Laurana editore, 2019), Enne (Voland, 2020).
His third novel L'abbandono is out for the types of La nave di Teseo.
At seventy-two years old, the Father is a man bent by life: a retired high school teacher, an unpublished writer who has never found the courage to have his manuscripts read, the Father has developed a clear and incontrovertible idea of women: they are creatures who , if you love, they can only betray you and leave you. His mother left him when he was still in diapers, to save himself during the bombing of Treviso. And he was left by his wife, who died at a young age of nail melanoma. The Father raises the two children with the help of his sister: the Aunt, a Venetian commoner with outspoken manners, a biting tongue and a fervent, but all facade, religiosity. The children – Stefano and Anna – are treated unequally: to Anna, more docile, the Father gives a lukewarm benevolence while Stefano, older than three years, with a proud and arrogant character, is the object of constant and never concealed hostility. From an early age, Stefano and Anna lean on each other to face the loss of their mother and the coldness of their father. Their relationship evolves from the adoration of the small towards the great, to the acts of violence and manipulation of the great towards the small, finally to a sentimental relationship that leads, during adolescence, to the first sexual relationships. When the aunt discovers that Anna and Stefano are lovers, the boy, now a university student, is sent away from home. He will never come back to you.
Years go by and Anna and Stefano each try to build an independent life for themselves. After a degree in Oriental Languages, Anna worked for some time in an ESF training institution and then embarked on the path of freelance copywriter; the discomfort of being alone in the family leads her to develop a strange phobia: terrified at the thought of dying of the same disease as her mother, Anna is unable to look at her hands, which she hides under a pair of white gloves. Paolo, the man she will marry, helps her to get rid of it, but when the marriage ends Anna falls back into her trouble: her life raft. The economic difficulties following the separation force her to return to her childhood home. The Aunt, no longer self-sufficient, has been hospitalized in a facility for the elderly and it is Anna who takes care of the Father. Elderly, exhausted, greedy and hypochondriac, the Father has put aside his books and his literary ambitions to devote himself to a bizarre and macabre pastime: every day he studies the files in the General Register of unidentified corpses of the Labanof, the Anthropology Laboratory and Forensic Odontology of the University of Milan. In addition to looking after him, Anna begins to write stories for him: the invented reconstruction of the last hours of life of these unknown individuals. The narration gives them an identity and the Father a form of peace. However, Anna is not pacified: her life appears suspended to her, and she knows well that the responsibility for this lies in the never resolved relationship with her brother.
In the meantime Stefano has become an esteemed heart surgeon, but his love life is disastrous; the only true bond that he has managed to keep is the one with his sister, whom he continues to see regularly, in detached meetings but pregnant with a past that makes them very dense. A bond, the one between Anna and Stefano, which has now become an addiction, and which ends up sabotaging the lives of both.
The story develops on three narrative levels: the account - built on swinging dialogues - of a long evening between father and daughter, which will become for Anna an awareness in view of the final decision; the emergence of memories that reconstruct the history of the family in flashes over forty years, narrated from Anna's point of view; and the stories of the unidentified corpses of Labanof, written by Anna and annotated by the Father: lives devastated and left on the sidelines, which translate the sense of precariousness of the characters, but also their desire for redemption and rebirth.
In an alternation of dark and light colors, elegiac and grotesque, "The Abandonment" tells the complexity of family ties and how love can sometimes take unpredictable forms, but no less vibrant and authentic for this.
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Title: Francesco
Publisher: in submission
Agent: r.vivian literary agency
Synopsis
November 14, 1985: the heart of Francesco Busnello, an eighteen-year-old in an irreversible coma after a motorbike accident, is transplanted into the chest of Ilario Lazzari, a thirty-nine-year-old heart patient with only a few weeks to live. The operation is performed by Vincenzo Gallucci, head of cardiac surgery at Padua Hospital, in what will be the first heart transplant in Italy. Francesco Busnello is also the author's cousin, and forty years later, she reconstructs the story of the event and, above all, the difficulties of a choice—that of her uncles—that seemed heroic at the time: taking a step back from the pain and anger that overcomes you in the face of an unbearable loss like the loss of a child to consider a gesture of generosity toward someone you don't know, despite doubts and differing opinions (heart transplants could only be performed on a beating organ, and in the mid-1980s, the concept of "brain death" had not yet been fully embraced by common sense).
By comparing the sometimes conflicting and imprecise narratives presented by the media (which leads to the novel's first theme: how does the narration of a fact arise? What can we believe?) with personal memories clouded by the mists of time and therefore recovered with the truthful power that is inherent in writing, a multi-layered story emerges, rich in complexity and twists, which reveals not only itself, but the vices and virtues of an entire country: from the cover-up of the first real heart transplant in Italy, performed two years earlier in Milan, to the anti-science positions of some intellectual circles who see the transplant as predation, to the extremely complicated process of obtaining – in what was shaping up to be a new "big business" in the healthcare sector – the clearance from the then Minister of Health, the Christian Democrat and Venetian Costante Degan, caught between pleasing the Venetian electorate and cajoling the "scalpel barons" of the Roman hospitals; up to the final scandal, because Ilario Lazzari – who would die seven years later from AIDS and with a still perfectly healthy heart – was transfused with infected blood during the transplant, which had escaped the still superficial controls.
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