With His Back to the World

Wanda Marasco’s latest novel retraces the life of Ferdinando Palasciano, a Neapolitan doctor who lived through the final years of the Bourbon Kingdom and the early decades of unified Italy. Palasciano was a physician driven by a deep and unwavering calling, which compelled him to treat anyone in need, including the destitute and enemy soldiers. This led to him being charged with insubordination, from which he was spared only by the clemency of King Ferdinand II. His vocation was so fervent, almost utopian and at times obsessive, that in the end he took on the pain of others and was weighed down by constant disillusionment, until he quite literally “turned his back on the world”. This is where Marasco’s narrative begins: on the day his lifelong companion in Palasciano, Countess Olga Pavlova Vavilova, decides to have him committed to a nursing home as his delusions intensify. From here, the novel unfolds as a continuous play of mirrors between past and present, between Ferdinando’s life and Olga’s, two souls so intimately bound by love that they seem to be the reflection one of the other. Ferdinando’s descent into madness revives in Olga memories of her childhood and of her mother’s psychiatric afflictions, which are now eerily echoed in her husband’s. And they bring to mind her own physical affliction, the lameness that she had overcome thanks to Ferdinando, and which suddenly resurfaces after his confinement. Marasco weaves an elegy, intense and painful in tone. Her style is complex and refined, crafted with a finely tuned ear for language. She blends linguistic registers with mastery: the earthy immediacy of the Neapolitan dialect, the Italian of the educated elite at the time, and poetry, which is perhaps this story’s truest form of redemption.


Di spalle a questo mondo
Wanda Marasco
Neri Pozza, 2024