Tancredi Pisciotta was born in Palermo, but has lived in Milan for some time. He has now reached the age of forty and feels strongly the lack of a child, who does not seem to arrive. Just as he feels a strong desire to disconnect from everyday life and take refuge away from his habits, in Piano Battaglia, in the Madonie, in the heart of Sicily.
In this remote place in the Sicilian mountains, half a century earlier, his grandfather Adelmo brought a mobile home, which has become the family home. In that refuge Tancredi tries to recover a peace that seems to have abandoned him, but instead finds himself catapulted into a mysterious fact of blood. After a full moon night, in fact, it is he who finds the body of Amir, a Moroccan shepherd: he is lying on the ground, with a large branch near his head. Two words just whispered come out of his mouth: "The wolf". Meaningless words also because the last wolf of the Madonie has been killed for a long time. Yet those words excite the inhabitants of Piano Battaglia, fuel comments, murmurs and suspicions. The only one who doesn't say anything is Angela, a girl with a wild beauty, but who hasn't spoken since she was a child. Inside her eyes are hidden secrets bigger than her and it will be up to Tancredi to bring them out, to bring back hidden truths in the distant past.
Passionate and bitter novel as Sicily knows to be, “The Last Wolf” (Rizzoli, 2021, pp. 180, also e-book) is much more than a classic detective novel or a mystery. It is above all an investigation into the passions and emotions that mark women and men forced to deal with their own lives.
We ask the author, Corrado Fortuna how this story was born, so engaging, but also so harsh in outlining human relationships:
“The idea for the book was born in the summer of 2018. Those were terrible months, those of closed ports and blocked migrant ships. The media often reported words that referred to feelings such as hatred, fear. At that time I too was going through a difficult period and I began to think that I had never ventured into a 'black' story, despite my passion for thrillers. I began to think about the story of Amir, a Moroccan shepherd who migrated from his country, who lived through all the vicissitudes and traumas of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. This idea then, as often happens, began to intertwine with other ideas and with the moment I was living ".
Does the book also have an autobiographical root?
“I have a mobile home in the Madonie and I took refuge there at a complicated moment in my life. My wife and I were following a path of assisted fertilization and it was a long time that we tried to have a child, without success. So I moved into the mobile home and Amir's story began to grow, to develop in unexpected directions at first. Other characters were born and the book, in addition to telling about immigration anyway, about feeling alien to the place where you live, began to talk about characters who have within them pains, fears and traumas that come from the past. and who have to deal with this past. ".
What character is Tancredi and what lies behind his obsessive search for a son?
"He is not obsessed with having a child, but he is not afraid to show how strong his desire for fatherhood is, he lays bare his dreams and even his fears because this child who does not arrive exposes him to a very strong fear : that of being alone. For the first time in one of my books, I created a protagonist who is a contemporary of mine and I wanted to create a character who recognizes himself in the desire for parenthood, a desire that too often is attributed only to women. ".
In his book we immerse ourselves in a particular place, the Madonie. Why the choice of such a particular stage?
“First of all I wanted to tell about a Sicily a little different from the one based on beaches and prickly pears you are used to. I wanted to tell a lesser known Sicily, made up of rugged mountains and wild nature. Furthermore, Piano Battaglia is one of the few places I went to as a child and which has remained the same, almost unchanged. The nature of that place is for me the concrete testimony of what we are losing, of what we are putting at risk. For this reason I wanted one of the great protagonists of my book to be the woods, the mountains, in short, the environments of the Madonie, a magical, truly fairytale place ".
And as in every fairytale, the wolf is not lacking in your novel ...
“The wolf is a metaphor for the fears we carry inside, not something concrete, because wolves have been missing in the Madonie since 1924, when the last specimen was killed. In my family it is said that it was my great-great-grandfather who killed him and perhaps for this reason, as compensation, I wanted to put a wolf in my book. And then I dream that one day this animal can be reintroduced in the Madonie, a habitat that seems to have been created especially for it ".