PUBLISHED
THE GLOW OF THE WHITE SWALLOW
CARD
TITLE: The title of this novel prescinds from its geographical and human setting and becomes coffer to its contents’ raison d'etre, or rather to the cry of innocence, as shiny and beautiful as a white swallow.
GENRE: The glow of the white swallow is a travel-novel book inhabited by poetical lyricism.
STYLE: The linguistic architecture of this little book is smooth, supple, elegant and elegiac. Its graphic design uses three types of fonts, as are its identity veins: the narrator’s diary inner song and cry, the novel, and the novel within the novel, which all travel on dreamlike rails.
CONTENTS / MESSAGE: The architecture of this "pocket-sized" work rests its foundations on the fascinating and unknown African “elsewhere” (already different from the distant times’ one, in which warriors as numerous as the stars of the sky guarded atavistic secrets), the faraway “elsewhere” (of the distant families) and the parallel “elsewhere” (the one the white man contrives, in Africa, and in which he moves as an alter ego half white, half black and half in a color poised between human and sub-animal species).
PLOT MINI SUMMARY: The characters move, in a physical and human geography, with unimaginable and unknown implications, between tight events, immeasurable risks and heartbreaking sensations.
Virgilia lives in Africa with her beloved Giulio. She starts dreaming, in episodes, about the predicament of Yanet, a very young white girl, while, horrified by the nefarious behavior of some white men, she goes to great lengths in order to help and save ‘Ndoto, a very young black girl about to give birth to a son who shall sentence her to death. Seeking to save her and always dreaming Yanet’s thriller, Virgilia delves into the unspeakable secrets of tribal laws and of tangled intrigues woven by a shaman, the mchawi, whose wickedness borders on unsuspected depths. She discovers incredible and frightening things, but also the sure clarity of true wisdom and the unimaginable horrors of which wickedness and ignorance are capable. The unpredictable and terrible events unleashed by the evil mchawi make Virgilia fall into a death trap. Between the expectations of the serial dream and the unstoppable anxiety of tribal rituals, the readers are drawn into the double mystery of Yanet and 'Ndoto, waiting for the final puzzle to recompose. Shall Virgilia survive the death trap she falls into? Shall she unveil ‘Ndoto’s mistery and the dream girl’s secret? Pages of pure literature are those that imbue with lyricism the adventures of the characters and above all of the woman who, letting herself be inhabited by the world, crosses light and darkness, harmony and its lacerations and lets them decant in her soul together with the innocence’s essence of which the winged "white swallow" becomes a symbol.
