xIn addition to the seesaw of feelings, their complex inner game, the loss of Sara and her naked body (quote) 'resembling a wax statue' introduce another dialectical level into the novel: the drive of love as vitality and fusion, but also what is immanent to this motion, namely separation, loss, distance. It is a law: when we experience something intensely, we have already lost it. But if this loss were not there, we would not even enjoy fleeting fullness. This is a theme dear to Maiorana, a strong element of his 'world view'. A modern philosophical element, recalling Martin Heidegger's 'being-for-death'. But it is also an ancient element, of a metaphysics I would dare say 'pre-Socratic', and one that is well suited to Maiorana's Mediterranean soul, and to the timeless myths of his island.
It is this quest, this 'demon' that animates the protagonist, restless. A modern man, a new Ulysses, searching for an identity, a place to find himself, a man who has cut off his roots for having loved them too much. And this is confirmed by the poignant scene of the 'return', of the stillness, not even of lasting love. The truth of man and the world are in the continuous movement, in departures that follow one another, in separations that mark wounds, in the soul and in the body, and that write the palimpsest of our life, which for Maiorana, as for every true writer, becomes 'the book', an unspeakable tale of love and suffering (Giuliana Morandini).