The latest novel by Davide Puccini is part of the nowadays Bildungsroman genre or training novel. The sea season (Giuliano Ladolfi Editore) accompanies, in fact, the growth of the protagonist Renato from early adolescence to the threshold of youth, in relation to a specific historical-environmental context, through a succession of significant events and intimate psychological and psychological educational-pedagogical purposes. The title, while emphasizing the primary role played in spite of himself by the sea, which intrigues the moods and places of a community after World War II to today, also alludes to the most unstable and liquid season of the human age, in which experiences and meetings acquire a decisive impact.
The city in which the daily heroes of this novel move (known since the beginning of the nineteenth century of a very important iron and steel center, whose failures on the environment and on the health of workers touch closely the childhood of the protagonist) is Piombino, which was already the background to the events much more mysterious than the previous novel by Puccini The book and the soul, where he was born and lives the author, from whose beating heart, which is Piazza Bovio, in the clearest days, you can to distinguish with the naked eye all the islands of the Tuscan Archipelago and the "finger" of Corsica, as they do, in a beautiful, airy and detailed descriptive page of the novel, the young Renato and his more adult friend Marino, whose name could not better highlight its close link with the sea. The protagonists of the novel are just a serious boy and a scholar and an adult, who devotes himself to the art of poaching, until it is supplanted by more sophisticated techniques, and then move on to other illegal activities because of which you take a few months of jail.
One could immediately think of an ethical contrast already strongly outlined, if the relationship between the two was not, however, much more complex and characterized by a tangle of psychological feelings and nuances that force the author to investigate the area in which the distinction between evil and good, especially when accompanied by a transport of the heart, becomes less peremptory than superficially one is led to believe. Marino, a man without moral depth, ignorant and crude, and yet not evil, capable also of emotional outbursts and somehow desirous of fatherhood, exercises on Renato, fatherless and motherless, that role of guide to the most concrete things of life, which can not compete with the patient and affectionate grandmother Marcellina, with whom the young protagonist lives, and which constitutes for him, by his example, a simple but authentic model of life, made of loving sacrifices, dignity and devotion.
Renato, left without a father very early, sees Marino as an alternative and authoritative male reference, partly because he nurtures a sincere feeling of admiration for the skill and courage with which he practices poaching. It is as if for the boy the sea and Marino constitute the inseparable elements of a sort of enchantment that he long tells himself for superabundance of fantasy, need for identification, perhaps also for excess of ingenuity and sentimental generosity.
Davide Puccini describes with psychological acuteness the behavior and reactions of the two characters, both in the concrete development of the events of which they are actors, and in the dialogic confrontation, careful to underline the intellectual and spiritual enrichment of Renato , which takes place in a completely realistic way through a gradual awareness of the real existential values, compared to which the intellectual and moral substance of his old friend is increasingly miserable. There are two events that accelerate and the process of emotional maturation and the moral of the protagonist: the relationship with her age Elena, who was born early in the schools of a third grade, will accompany him until his youth, consolidating day after day to seal the sacred marriage pact; and the meeting with an attentive and sensitive priest who will lead him to the reconquest of the faith.
The relationship of Renato with the classmate Elena, tender and at the same time volitional, therefore, constitutes, on a narrative level, a second path of sentimental initiation. In reality, the boy's entrance into sexuality happens in an almost traumatic way in a scene that I would define in some aspects Fellini (though so far from the director's tenderness towards prostitutes) for certain physical characteristics of Marino's partner (whose name Angela plays almost like an outrageous mockery), which offers him his majestic breasts with the vulgar arrogance of his corrupt nature. However, such an experience has both the function of placing the young person in front of the concrete power of physical desire, and that of making him appreciate more the diversity of attraction for Elena, which continues to grow, tender and intense, but respecting their age. and moral rules.
In short, Davide Puccini scrutinizes with delicacy and psychological depth the limel between good and evil that every adolescent faces in his personal "sea season", highlighting the ideal tools for a correct pedagogical training: study, respect, moral solidity, family, faith. Moreover, the author, who is a man of profound religious conviction, never gives up ethically committed writing, able to leave useful messages in the minds of readers, linking back to the nineteenth-century tradition, in particular and obviously to Manzoni, to whom the other, in some way, refers to the sluice of the book which gives an account of the continuation of the story of the two lovers after a not indifferent temporal leap.
The narrative structure is traditional: the plot unfolds in strictly chronological order, in fourteen chapters; of each character the physical aspect is sketched with richness of particulars so that it is an effective instrument of reading its inner qualities; the fundamental themes are developed with coherence and fluency thanks to a clear language, which uses a solid syntactic structure, far from any experimentalism.
The book, however, is not only this: it is also the polite and effective fresco of a small community that, after the disasters of the Second World War, transforms itself by opening itself up to new technology and acquiring a more varied social physiognomy. And despite that, apart from the few protagonists, all the others remain in the background, what is said is enough to make us understand a dynamic network of relationships and democratic among the various classes. Even the two boys, Renato and Elena, despite having two very different social backgrounds, understand and integrate thanks, above all, to the qualitative leap made by the male protagonist thanks to his cultural journey. There are no pages in this novel intense lyricism, especially those that passionately tell the sea and its intimate and secret environment, pages that betray the personal bond of the author with this element that has always marked his life. Every season, therefore, is "the sea season", if it is true that it, day by day, offers colors and images of itself, and takes and gives, and tells, and keeps silent and screams. There is no event of this history of which the sea is not a witness, there is no place (street, street, square, building) that is not pervaded by its light and its voice. The novel begins and ends, if we exclude the few final pages, with a declaration of love for the sea: "I have not been able to live without sea for a long time" (p.5) and "I realize I behave just like the sea was my lover "(page 172); and I must say that a similar definition of the sea as "my lover" refers (but I do not know if the author has intentionally done so) to the maternal waters in which each individual story has always begun.