La via dei lupi (The Way of the Wolves) by Carlo Grande

 Perhaps not everyone knows that Carlo Grande thinks his places through before writing about them. Then he lives them in person. And then he feeds on them again until he feels them ringing inside himself.

The story of Francois di Bardonecchia is worth a lifetime. It was truly worth writing. It is music for strong souls, the ones that do not lose heart when life hurls stones at you. It feels like reading those books where the villains keep on winning. And a feeling of rebellion keeps rising to your heart, and yet there is no winning. It almost drives you mad. And you no longer know where right lies. The boundary becomes very blurred.
Keep on fighting, keep on rebelling, or bend without having lost? How many more years will you stay angry, my lord, is the lament his wife addresses to Francois when she feels she has lost him. To a feeling that burns like a dark flame.

On the cover a phrase stands out in full view and catches the eye: the story of a rebellion in the Middle Ages. It truly is the story of a man who preferred the way of the cold to the way of surrender.
What is more, his defeat is even grimmer, almost sardonic. It laughs in his face, as if to mock him all the more: the beloved daughter for whom he gave up everything in order to wash away the stain served on his honour falls in love with his tormentor. And she runs away with him, grieving but in love. This is the sharpest sorrow that wounds the father. The darkest pain, the kind that can make your mind totter and almost lose it in a darkness that burns.
Francois does not understand and loses himself in the woods for ten years. In the cold, in a snow he fights by seeking out hollows where he can sleep without being bitten, without having his flesh torn from the dreams of the past. He sees his whole life in those ten wild years. He hears a distant call, which troubles him and wins him over too. It is the call of the wolves. A “mania” of Carlo Grande's. Which, however, in these pages becomes a collective creature moving with the seasons. It is a migration of the soul, Francois's. He decides to go on living until he decides to give in. Like when the leader of the pack dies and the other wolves sense a void opening up that hurts. But they do not tremble because of it, because the sense of the pack and of unity is a thing of the woods. And it obeys an ancient law, one that smells of far away. There must be a chthonic code engraved in each of us. Francois – at a certain point – decides that the moment has come. And he hands himself over to death. He decides to die when he wants to. Like the wolves when they realise that the sad hour has struck. They realise it from the ache that grips their legs, and from that mocking glance they see reflected in the pale irises of their fellows. Silently they move away. And they die in private, with regal dignity, without pretence.

This is how Francois dies, without ever having disowned his life and what it held in store for him. He dies as he lived. With a pride that never bowed its head. He dies of pride, he dies all at once and with a gesture as regal as it could possibly be. He dies like an old wolf with a sacred fleece and an unbroken jaw. He dies. Simply.
Carlo Grande's merit remains that of having given substance to a true story with words that only an inspired scribe of the time could have penned on a parchment. His feeling is the same as Francois's and he manages to give it a melodic breath that pierces through the ages and never tires the eyes of the mind. It is ancient music that Carlo Grande makes ring out in these pages, worthy of a writer of the soul. Writing a historical novel in which psychology also rules the roost could have been a lethal test. Instead he passes it. With passion and an animal-like search for a soul in the grip of rage. Grande never leaves Francois alone, and walks beside him for his whole life. He is inside him and speaks through his heart. This is the most intimate leap the writer has managed to somersault into his character. And so he has been able to make him breathe in the middle of the snow, when dawn reddens the ice and you seem to hear the first song of the lark.
The wolves are silent presences in the book. But indispensable ones. They seem like underground creatures, but to Francois they give a way to survive.

He senses them, and becomes like them.
It is a book that should have had a busier readership than it has had. But I am sure it will happen.

By the same author we have also reviewed Terre alte, il libro della montagna.