In The Nerves And In The Heart

“It is exhausting to try to change the trajectory of a destiny, one can lose sleep over it”.
This attempt is at the heart of this book: a public diary, in which stumbling is the apprenticeship of life, as it is for everyone.

The beginning is childhood, the time when the experience of each one of us takes root, and during which, as Cesare Pavese wrote, ‘nothing has happened, or it slumbers only in the nerves and in the heart’. Rosella Postorino’s childhood was marked by uprooting: and her vision of the world was born from a sense of being alienated, different, anxious for redemption. These pages alternate between the personal and the collective, because our existence and our choices are rooted in common experiences: leaving, staying, the fear of failure, of losing someone, or oneself. We are all driven by desire, doubtful of happiness, tempted by an impossible return home, thrown into history in spite of ourselves.

With the impetus of analysis and the rigour of empathy, Rosella Postorino tells of the Edenic and rugged place called the family, of women’s aspirations and difficulties, the vulnerability of the body, of the injustices that inhabit the earth, of the ethical dilemmas of contemporaneity, and of the absolute faith in literature. Her breathtaking prose explores the confusion, the abyss, and the tenderness of being human.

I write to claim our right to triumph and to lose, to be transparent and inscrutable, which is something difficult to fully grasp because we are ambiguous, that is, human.
(Rosella Postorino)

“I have written many books, but none as dazzling as hers. The words are not of this world, they bewitch and dumbfound.”
Eugenio Borgna, Corriere della Sera

“The kind of book I like: shameless in content and chaste in writing.”
Crocifisso Dentello

“Pages of beauty and suffering of rare intensity written in a total state of grace.”
Titti Marrone, Il Mattino

“Like Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues, it illuminates the contradictions of living through glimpses and revelations with a disarming participation.”
Ilaria Gaspari, 7Corriere

“In the Nerves and in the Heart is a blessed book – blessed for she who wrote it and for whomever reads it.”
Franco Cordelli

Il tempo delle Donne 2024 – Paolo Giordano dialoga con Rosella Postorino, in occasione dell’uscita del suo nuovo libro

Podcast “Voce ai libri”, ep 108 – Silvia Nucini dialoga con Rosella Postorino, autrice del romanzo “Nei nervi e nel cuore”