The following sample essay on Bambinate by Piergiorgio Paterlini Review about role models and educators of our children for us.
“Bambinate” – childish – that’s what kids do when they act alone or jointly with others. Such behavior can give us silly adults, clumsy, thoughtless, aimless and appear futile. We see strange and smile. Even if the children violated in their game against the rules, we are inclined generous ignore it, because> there are just kids, ‘and that may still live in their own world, have their own rules.
This trivialization children’s behavior contradicts Piergiorgio Paterlini. The journalist and writer (born 1954) is that it will dramatically underestimated what actually occurs among children. At issue is of strength and exercise of power, and yet without any corrective such as ethics and morality. Since the thin varnish of civilization certainly not innate is, children are not innocents, but may be heartless beasts until they learn compassion. Quotes from Augustine, Mark Twain and Pier Paolo Pasolini leave no room for illusions: “I ragazzi sanno raffinatamente come far soffrire i loro coetanei: e lo fanno molto meglio degli adulti perché la loro volontà di far soffrire è gratuita: è una violenza allo stato puro.
[…] La loro pressione Pedagogica su te non conosce né Persuasione, né comprensione, né alcuna forma di pietà, o di umanità.”
All the more stronger the euphoria of the child’s winner, the more disastrous the damage which carry the losers. In fact, we have long known that our lifelong personal development is significantly influenced by childhood experiences.
But why are we adults then usually ready for leniency, glorify childhood – also own our – as if it were a consistently perfect world, a carefree time of exploration, the harmonic game in the protected area? Such questions are the ones to whom Paterlini pursues in “Bambinate”.
The novel has two storylines. The first – about a fifth of the total volume – we read how a handful of ten to eleven year old boys humiliate a much weaker classmates and mistreat brutal. In the second round one of the Horde fifty years later returned to his home town in the Bassa Padana, to explore how the other this event have processed.
Ermes, Franco, Maurizio, Olmo and the narrator have Denis for years chosen as the victims of their insults and blows. The boy’s emaciated, introverted, stutters, does not resist. They call him “Semo”, a corruption of “scemo”. On Good Friday in 1965 their aggressiveness escalated. Led by Ermes they spit Denis, hit, kick, Stripping and abuse him sexually, it tugging on a nearby hill, tie him up, tie the blood ends to a wooden cross and make it.
These tortures described by the narrator minutely and concise. While Ermes always new frontiers exceeds and the other more or less participate, the narrator remains at bay. With a mixture of pity, disgust and lack of understanding, but also curiosity observing the events without intervening. His attention is particularly Ermes and what in his eyes light up. Hatred, contempt, sadism, triumph and boundless power.
The epitome of suffering is the Passion of Jesus. Therefore, the author Denis ‘ordeal has explicitly set in relation to Jesus’ crucifixion. It is Good Friday, the way the group leads out of the city to a hill on which the cross stands, the abuses increased in stages, various adults face the withdrawing group and react to what they perceive. So that no one overlooks the parallelization, the plot is divided into little chapter that are overwritten with the stations of the Passion: “Gethsemane – La soldataglia – Il Sommo Sacerdote – Le Pie Donne – Golgotha - Il cireneo – Crucifige – Pilato – Deposition” </. p>
The pathetic exaggeration is unnecessary. Paterlini will illustrate a psychologically explicable phenomenon that is relevant even without recourse to the Bible. The adult passersby see the children, but do not understand approximately what is going on. They are too indifferent and blind, for her gaze is transfigured by the conventional wisdom of what childhood is. They managed to hold the get-together for a coexistence, Denis’ passivity for shy restraint, and encourage all just good so on to play.
The biblical character who hated the narrator as a child most is Pontius Pilate, “chi lasciava colpire un innocente sapendolo innocente”. He could have prevented had, but happen “deciso di non decidere”. finds him the narrator even worse than Judas, “l’amico che tradisce”. He realizes that he has just failed like Pilate, but knows how to exculpate “Li avevo Lasciati colpire Ero stato a guardare Me n’ero lavato le mani Ma cosa fare potevo Io as solo e comunque dentro di me…?. avevo odiato la loro e ferocia provato pena by Denis non. si Poteva dire fossi stato veramente complice. ” With this burden of conscience must be the narrator for half a century for life, as far as he is also from his home away.
The remaining four-fifths of the novel briefly report how the narrator after graduation his home has left and started a family in America, but mainly describe how he returns exactly fifty years after the terrible events Good Friday. On the occasion of the class meeting, he traveled from New Jersey – unannounced, the former comrades found unprepared. As announced by numerous references advance, he is pursuing a plan. need to indicate more would jeopardize the tension.
As probably expected, the action has left no traces apparently. The child’s beasts are mutated to colorless philistines. They pretend not to remember, and do not want to be reminded. Other problems have made their life hard enough, it gives them trouble getting a reasonably harmonious facade upright. they see responsibility no, envy and inferiority towards the supposedly more successful, happier visitors, who now old “bambinate” seeking warm, the talks charge.
How they actually were as children, adults can not understand even more. This is a protective function. The men can not allow that they have lived uninhibited than boys their own desires at the expense of an innocent weaker and thereby done bad things. They displace unpleasant truths and the complete phase explain childhood as harmonious and harmless, because only then it is possible for them to make peace with himself. Thus the misunderstanding of childhood is perpetuated.
Paterlinis novel is worth reading because it provides the usual idyllization childhood in question. He describes this fine psychological insight a shocking extreme behavior of children and adults. As the latter deal with their past, seems perfectly plausible. In this respect we warned the author that we take our responsibility as role models and educators of our children for us.
Here is the second plot line (the 2015 plays) thin something and dragged out, and who after reading critical look back, who will wonder whether the actions of this narrator – including the end – is consistent and convincing.
Bambinate by Piergiorgio Paterlini Review. (2019, Nov 18). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/bambinate-by-piergiorgio-paterlini-my-review/