The Great Miracle of Love

A magnificent novel about the amazing connection between a girl and a doctor who decides to free her, about the eternal human need to be recognized by another in order to understand that he exists. The mother named the girl Elba after a river in her homeland. They lived in a psychiatric hospital, which Elba calls Half-World and which became their refuge. Then the mother disappears, and the girl is left to grow up, keeping a "Diary of Mental Disorders" for new arrivals and telling them about the doctors and nurses. The universe of Half-World is the only one she knows, at least until a young psychiatrist, Fausto Miracle, starts working with her to get her out of the hospital. A few years earlier, a Basaglia Law on psychiatric care and psychiatric reform was passed in Italy, containing guidelines for closing all psychiatric hospitals. Dr. Miracle takes Elba home with him, where she will live as his daughter. He was never a good father to his biological children; Elba is the only one he chose himself and through whom he learned the burden and strength of fatherhood. "Another's life sometimes seems mysterious, reckless. And it is this freedom that makes us incomprehensible. A person is capable of understanding only himself; everything else seems madness to him. My Mutti was not insane at all. In this world of madmen, she preserved her sanity. But she stayed here so as not to deny me. She invented a fairy tale about Half-World, a huge cruise ship that would certainly bring us love, about Captain Gaddu, who, despite all obstacles, leads us to salvation. And behind the guise of a fairy tale hid the truth, which fit entirely onto a typewritten page: to give me life, she renounced her own."