Joseph Lascala – data foto: October 2012

"The best memory beautiful" e "Natale a Saint Oyen" are two novels Author Joseph Lascala – di seguito le sue NOTE D'AUTORE

Note d'Autore– Joseph Lascala

I was born in Arzona, part of the municipality of Filandari, in the province of Vibo Valentia (Calabria), in 1949. For over forty years living and working in Milan. I was officer in a company transport. Il mio impegno attuale è nel sociale, working as a manager in the field of mutuality supplementary voluntary.
Author of publications in various journals and won literary awards with short stories and poems, I am at my second experience with the challenging genre of the novel.
In 2011, con Youcanprint Edizioni Youcanprint Edizioni, I published "The more I remember beautiful” e “Natale a Saint Oyen”: two novels that have found a good reception from audiences and critics and caused me quite gratifying awards.
I have already ready for the press a new novel, which completes the triptych of narrative works with which I wanted to open a window on reality of our time, trying to interpret the same reality on paper and then transfer feelings and emotions.

I ROMANZI

I remember the most beautiful

You a novel set in the rural world of the South, and wants to be above all a message of love to the old Patriarch, which for me remains the emblem of the great values ​​of life and holiness Family.
The narrative in this novel is divided into two parts.
In the first part the narrator remembers when, as a child, Grandpa, before you die, tells him the story of his life and his family. And the troubled life of his grandfather becomes a little life and history of the people of a small town in Calabria, Moreover emblem of the history of many countries of the South, from 1860 in su: four houses and a bakery, two or three lords and wealthy tyrants, a pair of overbearing, and the wretched people and miserevolissima, who spends his life in sacrifice, dramas, tragedies, diseases and abuses suffered.
Ma è a powder’ too believe that things have changed for the better. In fact, in the second part of the novel, describes the difficulties and painful attempts of immigrants to fit into the new reality in which the need has led them to live. They are then brought to light many of the negative aspects of migration, phenomenon that in the second half nineteenth and twentieth centuries has affected the south of Italy and is now particularly interested in countries outside – Community.
A push me to try my hand as a writer is not was certainly not the novel itself, traditionally, the modern inteso comunque, but above all the need that people like me have to tell their own story and their own experiences (precisely how does the narrator's grandfather), to bring order to his own conscience and his own memory, emblematic and make their own tribulations, that would otherwise remain too cruel.
A need, would have said Manzoni, you get the gist of the story.
With a language that I hope proves to be simple reader, clear and communicative, in this book, which also deals with the theme of death in the broadest sense, as a form of re-elaboration of pain to overcome the trauma and move forward, I tried to give expression to the characters and to present in an objective manner the record of certain events, in the hope that this very participatory narration of the slow flow of life in civilization rural South stimuli in those who have opportunity to read it, over which a bit’ of human understanding towards me and towards my characters, also and above all a historical reflection – Social on the events themselves and the current quality of our values.

Natale's Saint Oyen

Saint Oyen is a small town which is located in the middle road between Aosta and the Great St. Bernard Pass, where he established the home run Chateau Verdun, whose care is entrusted to the Augustinian canons, who remain true to their original mission of welcoming those who once were called pilgrims and, for over nine centuries, home to anyone wishing to combine a holiday with moments of spiritual meditation.
In the story told in this book, when Christmas is just around the corner, the narrator decides to go in that house to spend the holidays with his family.
His is not however a desire to vacation or an escape, but the search for a bit’ di pace, something that allows him to reflect on his doubts, on his life, the meaning of life and its true value.
Thus begins a conscious journey to a place that can combine spirituality and rest, nature and silence. And it is just from that experience that is came up with the idea to write the novel "Christmas in Saint Oyen".
It is a work that I conducted with enthusiasm and passion. Page after page, I tried to give fluency to reading, credibility characters; and I tried to approach the issues addressed in such a way that the reader he was the most can be involved in a compelling narrative, which is then read all in one go and that he had even a modicum of literary merit.
This novel would have the effect of making the reader participate in the personal human story the protagonist's, in which there is also a sort of creative torment that, through writing, would like to find the man, its heat, its emotional charge, but also a taste for a living narrative, that captivates and fascinates.
“Natale a Saint Oyen" is a novel in which I have taken some of the passages expressive of my thirty-year commitment to social, Recalling the reasons underlying my vocation for solidarity.
The view of the bell tower, taken from the photo gallery of the town of Saint Oyen, I chose for the cover, another is not that the synthesis of the inspirations of the same novel, which she draws on episodes of my biography with the intention of presenting a vision of life inspired by the values ​​of ethics –  religiosi della cristianità cattolica.
From this paper would emerge will to make the reader understand, without pedagogismi, that behind each of the three lives is told a plan of mercy and at the same time an example of religious life that can show a way to lift your spirits above the ugliness of the modern world, senza should, requires us.
Christmas in Saint Oyen would also open the door of memories and consciousness of a world of loneliness and suffering next to our world of active and busy, that we often forget: the weak and the losers.
This is it I, as author, with great modesty, but also with the rawness of some episodes described, I tried to do with the novel "Christmas in Saint Oyen".
I wish you good reading.

Joseph Lascala