La Spoon River di Jan Brokken

[Autom. eng. transl.] the writer, journalist and Dutch traveler Jan Brokken - already known in Italy for his biographical novel about the Russian pianist Youri Egorov (In the house of the pianist, Iperborea 2011) - through a work of real "archeology of the contemporary", he went to search for those fragments and told us the story. Because this is the merit of Brokken's work: as a true narrator he is, he does not pretend to statically reposition those fragments in their places of origin to exhibit only the origin, but it follows the movement during the explosion, a deflagration of which miraculously we can hear the sound, the smell, the pain. Through a decade-long journey that began in 1999 in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the writer has retraced the places of memory and the present which is substantiated by that memory, following the sound of voices still shouting from beneath the stratified rubble of the regimes, the voices of those Baltic souls who have not stopped living, just as the soul of the great does not cease to live but is perpetuated by fertilizing the spirit of the future, spreads far from its place of origin to light new fires, like the splinter of a bomb gone away.