The feminine Malindi of Sara Cardelli hits and paints a very current reality and disengaged from the usual common places of sexual tourism to the tropics or the exotic adventure.
"Mali of Africa" ​​(Ilmiolibro, 320pag.) Tells the north coast of Kenya populated by Italian sun women and self-master, and by affectionate and affectionate beach boys of ethnicity Mijikenda who, inevitably and without any need to know what "Stupid Cupid "come into contact.
As a scenery, the enveloping African nature that attenuates the clamor and the paradox of seeing and living at the same time the mud huts villages and the elegant resorts on the Indian Ocean shore, the funeral rites of poor and dignified people and the unleashed Disco-party on the beach.
Malindi and Watamu, for at least thirty years, are so: social and economic contradictions that coexist in an unstable balance that the climate, the wonder of the places, and the peace of the senses can often turn into harmony.
The "Mali of Africa" ​​referred to in the title of the novel are actually pains and lusts that Western society has long exported to the equator and the effect they have on that part of the local population who lives in tourism.
In the middle, and in the depths of completely different existences and souls, love and its many facets.
Sara Cardelli, who, as the protagonist of the tale, lived in Malindi and returned to Italy with a beautiful child, the result of a relationship with a guy in a lap dance, very well traces of Giulia, Jenny and Eva, three Italian women living Their Africa and their relationships (especially those with the other sex, identified with young people and available "tour operators" by prodigious attributes and improbable nicknames) in total freedom.
Freedom to experience uncontrolled emotions, to learn through suffering, to cultivate unpublished and naive thoughts, and to draw conclusions that are often too distant from their mentality but too close to the new reality to not bother.
Julia seeks true love, Jenny's family and African life, Eva chose that blend of inner serenity and fundamental cynicism to live and work from foreigners on the Kenyan coast.
It is she who Sara tells us that in Africa she also wishes to remember the things to forget and that it is better to experience remorse than regrets where it is even more evident that "every paradise has its hell."
The feminine ardor that devours the protagonists and makes the novel pleasantly devour (even with the strokes of a scripture devoid of different narrative plans) is precisely in the desire of the protagonists of "Failing rather than living with the awareness that we have not tried it."
Because in the end, as you will see, it is not true that love in Africa does not exist, is simply one of the many feelings on the market. It is the components with which our Western consciences have sworn to bring it back to the ground: sex, loneliness, jealousy.
It is just the presence of the ambitious beach-based palestras and their unified and coherent conduct in the key of history, and it is almost a shame that the author did not want or knew to enter the mentality of the Kenyan male with dialogues and moments between They, and not only in relation to their liaisons with the "mzungu".
Because otherwise, if we only reduce money, betrayals, scams and lies, the novel could have been quietly titled "Mali d'Italia in Africa".