Una giornata di pioggia e di uccelli che sporcano le strade, una ragazza di quindici anni che scivola e cade dal motorino. Una corsa in ambulanza verso l’ospedale. Lo stesso dove il padre lavora come chirurgo. È lui che racconta in presa diretta l’accerchiamento terribile e minuzioso del destino.

Nell’attesa, gelata dal terrore di un evento estremo, in un salotto attiguo alla sala operatoria, Timoteo, che da anni sembra essersi accomodato nella sua quieta esistenza di stimato professionista, di tiepido marito di una brillante giornalista, di padre distratto di un’adolescente come tante, è di colpo messo a nudo, scorticato, costretto a raccontarsi una verità che gli restituisce un’immagine di sé straniata e violenta.

Parla a sua figlia, parla a se stesso nel silenzio che lo circonda. Rivela un segreto doloroso che sembrava sbiadito dal tempo. Con precisione chirurgica rivela gli scompensi della sua vita, del suo cuore, in un viaggio all’indietro nelle stazioni interiori di una passione amorosa che lo ha trascinato lontano dalla propria identità borghese, verso un altro se stesso disarmato e osceno.

Edizioni estere

Timoteo, her father, is a surgeon in the same hospital; he is informed and comes to wait in an adjacent room. During this wait, petrified with terror at the prospect of losing his daughter, this man, who for years seems to have been perfectly settled in his quiet life as a respected professional, the lukewarm husband of a brilliant journalist, and the absent-minded father of an ordinary adolescent girl, is suddenly stripped bare, forced to tell himself a truth he has always suppressed. It is as if in our lives real truth can only be squeezed out by pain.

He talks to his daughter Angela in the silence that surrounds him. He reveals a painful secret, faded with time, which now comes back, vivid and acute: a summer many years ago (the year before she was born), a dreary suburb, a meek, forlorn woman (whose name is Italia, strangely enough)  and a disproportionate, apparently inexplicable passion.
With surgical precision Timoteo reveals to his daughter the inner stations of an amorous passion that dragged him far from his bourgeois identity, towards another disarmed, obscene self. On the one side the real surgical operation, the instruments, the monitors. On the other an invisible scalpel that pierces the raw flesh of memories, making them bleed.

While Timoteo recounts this bleak story, he seems to be asking Italia’s spirit, or her memory, to forgive him, as though his remorse and his shattered life might somehow appease her, or Fate, and save the life of his injured child.

NON TI MUOVERE is what Timoteo tells Italia when she’s dying, it’s what he keeps repeating his daughter Angela, it’s a plea like a sad refrain throughout the book: don’t move, don’t go anywhere. In the moving final pages, the operation seems to have been successful:  Angela has, at least, survived it.
A compelling, utterly readable book written with a denseness of imagery and an intensity of emotion that make a lasting impression with its themes of sin and redemption, obsession and science, surgery and sex.