«Era come se ci separasse il mare» Interferenze e contrasti in Cronaca familiare, di Vasco Pratolini
«It Was as If the Sea Separated Us» - Interference and Conflict in Vasco Pratolini's Family Chronicle

Summary/Abstract: This contribution aims to explore the topic regarding the interference and conflict in the context of human and family relationships, by analysing one of the most significant literary works referring to the Florentine writer Vasco Pratolini: Family Chronicle. The novel was published by the publishing company Vallecchi in 1947, even if Pratolini wrote and completed the work in December 1945, a few months after his brother Ferruccio died, in July that year. The text, divided into three main parts, follows the events related to the relationship between the two brothers: Ferruccio and Vasco. A complicated relationship, made of distance and misunderstanding, conflict and rapprochement, that the Florentine writer decided to fix on paper, in an ideal conversation with the departed brother. The “private” nature of the book is clarified from the beginning: Pratolini, in the introduction To the reader wrote: «This book is not a work of the imagination. It is the author's conversation with his dead brother. In writing it the author was looking for consolation, nothing more. He has the remorse of having barely understood his brother's spirituality, and too late. These pages are therefore offered as an inadequate atonement.». The three sections of the book follow the evolution of the difficult relationship between the two brothers: in the first part, which constitues the focus of this contribution, Pratolini will clarify the nature of the interference that, from the beginning, will create distance between the two: their mother's death, the adoption of the younger brother by a noble family, the distance and the wall of misunderstanding between the two brothers (with respect to this, Pratolini says: «[...] I was five years old and I couldn't love you; everyone was saying that mum had died because of you.»); in the second, after years of misunderstanding and conflict, a rapprochement between the two brothers takes place, in the attempt to find their way back together and heal the accumulated distance; the third and last part, the most intense and touching, is about the proximity between Vasco and Ferruccio, seriously ill and now close to death.

• Details
• Contents