Non ti muovere
295 pages, publication date : October 2001

Margaret Mazzantini, an actress by profession, was born in Dublin and lives in Rome. This book marks her eagerly awaited return to pure narrative, after the great success of Il catino di zinco (Marsilio 1994), her astonishing first novel.

A fifteen-year-old girl is taken to hospital after an accident on her motor scooter. Her condition is critical and the operating theatre is immediately prepared for an attempt at the operation that might save her life.

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.