Commander (Editorial Anagrama), by Edoardo de Angelis and Sandro Veronesi, is our book of the weekwhich tells a story of humanity in the midst of war and the rescue of the commander Salvatore Todaro.
On September 28, 1940, the submarine Cappellini of the Italian fascist navy left the port of La Spezia heading to the Atlantic, via Gibraltar. In command was veteran commander Salvatore Todaro, a man whose chest was covered in steel armor due to old combat wounds.
During their mission, they sighted a Belgian ship, the Kabalo. A naval battle ensued and the submarine sank the enemy ship. After a while, they saw several surviving crew members appear. Despite the fact that the German admiral Dönitz explicitly ordered that they not be rescued, Todaro decided to contravene his superiors and prioritize, over military regulations, the law of the sea, which says that shipwrecked people must be rescued. His gesture makes him a hero who connects the past with our present of boats rescued on the high seas by ships that, all too often, the authorities do not want to let disembark in their ports.
This parallelism was what led Sandro Veronesi to accept the request of filmmaker Edoardo De Angelis to work with him on the script for his next film, about the figure of Todaro. In parallel, they wrote a novelistic version in four hands, constructed through a succession of voices that recount the commander’s noble gesture.
The resulting narrative can be read, in the context of the migratory crisis that is plaguing the waters of the Mediterranean – and the consequent wave of xenophobia that Veronesi denounces in the introduction – as a vindication of the human values that must be imposed in the face of barbarism, as well as a celebration of the figure of Todaro, unjustly forgotten in the pages of our history.
The authors
Edoardo De Angelis (Naples, 1978) is an Italian film director and screenwriter. His film debut was in 2011 with the film Mozzarella Storieswhich was followed by others like Indivisibili, winner of various awards, including five Nastro d’argento and six David de Donatello. In 2018 she published the novel Il vizio della speranza, also adapted to the cinema. Between 2021 and 2022 she directed a six-episode series based on the novel by Elena Ferrante The lying life of adults. In Anagrama he has published Commanderwritten with Sandro Veronesi.
Sandro Veronesi (Florence, 1959) is one of the best novelists of his generation, as well as a prominent essayist and journalist. In Anagrama he has published the novels calm chaos (his greatest work, for which he won the Strega Prize and the Casino de Santiago European Novel Prize), Prophecy and The hummingbird (Strega Award), as well as the denunciation essay Saving lives in the Mediterranean. An intimate pamphlet against racism. His most recent work, written with Edoardo de Angelis, is Commander.
Buy it here.
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