The poetic phrases in 'The night trembles' contrast beautifully with the pain described

A sensitive, moving novel about natural and human violence: The night trembles by Nadia Terranova is highly recommended.

The major earthquakes in Umbria in 2016 are probably still in many people's minds. But who remembers that over a hundred years ago, southern Italy was hit by a devastating earthquake, the most destructive even in Europe in the 20th century? On 28 December 1908, just before dawn, the cities of Messina in Sicily and Reggio di Calabria across the Straits of Messina were razed to the ground. It is estimated that between 70,000 and 110,000 people died.

Apocalyptic natural disaster

About that apocalyptic natural disaster, Italian Nadia Terranova, born in Messina in 1978 - seventy years after the disaster - wrote a sensitive and moving novel. The main characters are young woman Barbara Ruello, who visits her grandmother in Messina the day before the catastrophe, and 11-year-old Nicola Fera, who lives across the street in Reggio di Calabria.

Barbara likes to visit her grandmother in Messina to escape the confined life with her father in a small village. He wants her to get married, while she loves literature and wants to study.

Tyres cut

Nicola grows up with parents who have a loveless marriage. Father Vicenzo is a businessman who 'owns everything at home but is the boss of nothing'. Mother Maria, 'a beanpole of an owl-eyed witch', is a bit religiously delusional and thinks her child has the devil in him. She ties him to a catafalque every night; laid up in the pitch-black cellar, he is at the mercy of loneliness and nightmares.

When the earth trembles and houses collapse, Barbara and Nicola lose everything but their own lives. Despite the shocking events, this also offers them both a certain relief: now that the ties to the past have been cut, the future lies open to them.

Fine contrast

Terranova's poetic phrases are a nice contrast to the pain and horror described. She has also chosen a beautiful, subtle narrative style. Her two main characters cross each other's lives at one defining moment, just after the disaster. The consequences of that event and the psychological wounds inflicted there, which the author cleverly shares with her readers, are perhaps even more far-reaching than the catastrophe itself. And yet there is hope. For although we rarely become who we think we are, we can become who we want to be.