Una grottesca «fantocciata»:dissonanze pirandelliane nella scrittura di Laura Di Falco

A grotesque "puppet": Pirandello's dissonances in the writing of Laura Di Falco Laura Di Falco's novel, Le tre mogli (The Three Wives), published by Rizzoli in 1967, sinks in to the Sicilian literary tradition which, as Natale Tedesco writes, condenses the investigation of disturbances of the conscience and of epochal disturbances into the "essayistic-reflexive" figure, of which Luigi Pirandello proves to be an exemplary interpreter. The fiction leaks in the capillary fabric of social, institutional and affective relationships of a world that the narrative shows in the form of a grotesque "puppet", corroding its conventions from inside, alienating its features and dramatising its contradictions on the ridge of Pirandello's subversion. An atmosphere of dissolution hovers over the alternation of epochs and generations, from the feoffment of the Risorgimento’s perspectives to the rise of Fascism, up to the threshold of the Second World War, through the devastation of the trench warfare and the propaganda of the Abyssinian colonization. The physical impotence of the protagonist is converted into a sort of cancer of the soul that engulfs, in the "inert immobility of its existence", the fate of the three 'wives', Diomira, Juliet and Ophelia, three sisters, differently involved in the volutes of this paradoxical "game of parts".