Daniele Mencarelli

The critically acclaimed novel from the author of Everything Calls for Salvation, adapted into a Netflix Original series, is a powerful coming-of-age story about loss, identity, and rebirth
Daniele is a young poet plagued by an unknown darkness, "an invisible disease of the heart, or of the mind." He refuses to conform to society's expectations--finding a job, starting a family--yet he struggles to define a path of his own and find a sense of purpose in life.
 In a desperate attempt to pull himself out of a dangerous spiral of emptiness and self-destruction, Daniele accepts a job at a pediatric hospital in Rome, the Bambino Gesù, where he'll work with sick children, many of them terminally ill. In the "house of gazes," that is, the hospital, through his interactions with patients and co-workers, and forced to confront pain in some of its most heartbreaking forms, Daniele will slowly start to look at life with new eyes, and learn to accept it in all its brutality and beauty.
Writing with the evocative power and sharp focus of a poet, Mencarelli tells a raw and moving story of self-discovery, renewal, and liberation achieved through solidarity and compassion, a story closely inspired by the events of his own life.

The House of Gazes

Huiting

But poetry bears witness to pain, it doesnt cure it. Words have always accompanied me. They're crystal and root, journey and blade. They’re everything but medicine. Poetry doesn't cure, If anything, it opens, unstitches, uncovers. But I no longer have the strength to create poetry.

Poetry must act as a servant for all the experiences I've had. It must offer itself in its miraculous paucity. Form must be more than mere appearance; it must obey the faces and stories that live through it. Words are a mystery. They deal with unknown forces, They can bear the burden of human tension, and they can convey it, fix it on a sheet of paper indefinitely, available through the centuries for those who want to read it. Writers aspire to this strength, this tension. No false beauty. No embellishment will conceal the disfigurement of reality, of children. I mustn't exist in these poems, Nothing must exist beyond the experiences l'm called to witness., Suffering doesn't stem from words that don't come, but from the kind of natural selection I permit myself to make with regard to what I've seen and experienced. I can't recount everything. It would take me years, perhaps more than a lifetime. I have to sacrifice some of those worlds that have opened up before my eyes. I’ve asked forgiveness from all of them and I'll continue to do so as long as I live.

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