Author:
Andrej Longo
Publisher:
Sellerio
Release Date:
25-02-2025
This is a collection of eleven short stories, set in Naples, in its endless suburbs.
The stories are all about women. They are taken from the news, stolen by everyday life, describing unknown portraits of ordinary life in Naples.
Eleven women dealing with common troubles, often trying to change the course of their lives, which seems to have already been established by someone else.
In ELEVEN we find unforgettable characters, such as Anna, a caregiver who finds a book of poems at an underground station, reads it and those poems will influence herself and even her attitude towards the elder man she looks after. Such as Aurora, who married a young member of the camorra in order to reach wellbeing and prosperity for herself and her children. And such as Luisella, the girl who wonders why a chair is kept in front of her parents’ housedoor.
The stories are told by eleven women, in a first-person narration.
The language they use is vivid and fluent, the dialogues are perfectly shaped.
The reader smiles and is moved at the same time.
Moreover, Andrej Longo goes further.
Eleven. Do not forget is also a warning.
It is a commandment, the eleventh actually, which forbids to forget what we would like not to remember.
It is forbidden to forget the injustice, the arrogance, the violence of which women are mostly the victims.
And it is also forbidden to forget how much beautiful life is when it is spent not just chasing our own pleasure.