The disappearance of colors
Able to combine an intimate and personal account with a profound reflection on the condition and rights of the handicapped, Manconi infuses his own experience into a book that, bordering on literature, is a true hymn to life.
What Luigi Manconi has been fighting for ten years now is, as he himself defines it, a "mortal battle" between the progressive darkness of blindness and the light that endures -- now reduced to an indistinct opalescence, now instead extraordinarily bright, resembling a tenacious glimmer or a sudden flash of lightning. Forced to face the irreparability of loss, but determined never to succumb to it, in "Disappearing Colors" Manconi takes the reader into the ever-changing universe of those who can no longer see, regulated by a new relationship between the senses and defined by an inevitable gap between reality, imagination and memory. He does so without indulging in sentimentality, but rather with a hint of irony, making use of the increasingly reduced and deceptive color palette that still allows the forms of the world to filter through, while day after day the hands, the "fragile terminal" of his subjectivity, take the place of the eyes as an indispensable tool of knowledge and connection with others.