Sicily at night in the new novel by Elvira Seminara

There is a moment, when the house turns off and the background noise of the day he retreats, in which reality changes consistency: the smells become clearer, the thoughts take on a different pace, the presences seem to emerge from the darkness.

It is in this period of time – more than in a simple scenario – that Lunario dei giorni insomni, a novel by Elvira Seminara published by Einaudi in the I corals series, moves.

The story is set in a residence by the sea in Sicily, which in the book becomes a point of close observation of “small human absurdities”. Here lives Iris, “almost fifty years old”, a failed marriage and the choice – or the need – to keep life within a controllable perimeter.

He shares the apartment with Jacopo: they share the rent and some quirks, but little else. Cohabitation is a practical arrangement, a balance of presences rather than a couple in the traditional sense.

By day Iris works online: she teaches literature to a “professional” audience looking for ready-made quotes and references, she composes maps – mental and otherwise – to orient themselves in the chaos. The real shift, however, occurs when the time changes: Iris goes out at nightwalks under the moon on the seafront and refines, step by step, a sort of waking discipline.

The title recalls the idea of ​​the lunar calendar: not a calendar of dates, but a scan made up of nights, small meetings, deviations. In the novel the night is not presented as empty: it is a space in which relationships and perceptions are reorganized. Iris finds a different possibility in the dark hours: less exposed, more lateral, but not sterile.

Complicating and broadening Iris’s trajectory is a central idea: insomnia is contagious. In a fiery September that seems never to end, the darkness is populated by a small nocturnal humanity: figures on the margins, people in transit, presences that inhabit “the reversed time of wakefulness”. Iris begins an ancient and immense lineage: that of the insomniacs, “border creatures”, a brotherhood scattered everywhere.

Among the most important encounters is Aida, an elderly neighbor who has forgotten many things. The relationship with her – a “strange” and apparently harmless bond – ends up expanding Iris’s horizon.

At the bottom, without turning into an explicit “message”, there remains an element that accompanies the entire story: an endless summer and a changing nature“in the grip of a disaster that resembles us”. It is also from here that the obsession for an elsewhere arises: for Iris, paradise is Alert, the northernmost human settlement on the planet, where she imagines unfulfilled dreams “in hibernation”.

Elvira Seminara lives between Catania and Rome, collaborates with magazines and runs writing workshops in Italy and abroad. For Einaudi he also published ‘Atlas of old clothes’, ‘The secrets of Thursday evening’ and ‘Devils of sand’.