The appeal: summary, plot, characters and most beautiful phrases of the novel by Alessandro D’Avenia that tells of an unusual journey towards the final exam.
The appeal: plot
L’appello ”, published by Mondadori, is a novel by the writer and teacher Alessandro D’Avenia . In these pages, through different literary forms and languages, the writer tells of a class that, in order to get to the final exam, is entrusted to a blind professor, thus becoming an orchestra directed by a particular maestro.
“How much love do we need to have a face?”
Summary and characters of The Appeal
Omero Romeo is a science teacher who has been blind for a few years and decides to return to teaching, taking charge of a fifth-year high school class. The class is different from all the others, it has its own prerogatives. It is, in fact, a rather problematic class that brings together kids hurt by their lives and with faded or destroyed dreams and ideals.
“He sings a choral unhappiness, in which everyone participates with an unmistakable timbre.”
Romeo is not a traditional teacher and his idea of school has nothing to do with the classic teaching method, aimed exclusively at the professional future. From the very beginning, it is clear that he wants to really know the kids in front of him to guide them towards maturity, not just as a piece of paper, but as self-realization. Romeo wants to help them become what each of them wants to be.
A new way to make the roll call
The first sign that something will surely change with the new professor is precisely the roll call , from which the title of the novel is taken. Unable to see the faces of the students, Romeo invents a new way of doing the roll call, convinced that to save the world it is necessary to save every single name present.
That’s why, instead of doing this task in a mechanical and distant way, the professor dedicates a lot of time to it, putting all the necessary attention into it. The boys pronounce their name, and then tell what best defines them, what their horizon is, who their heart sings in unison with. Afterwards, they let Romeo touch their faces, thus truly putting themselves in the hands of another.
“Touch tells us who we are and who we are not, where we begin and end, and the flesh we have in common. Life is all about touch.”
In this way, the teacher can really get to know these kids, discovering for the first time the difficulties, desires and dreams typical of a teenager but also the fears and personal dramas of each of those present. This appeal is not limited to being a mere presentation on the first day of school, but is repeated continuously throughout the school year. The kids evolve in their ideas, in their thoughts and their personalities become more and more evident as the months go by.
The class includes: Elena , so called because she was supposed to be the most beautiful; Cesare , called Ruggine, who speaks through a poetic rap in rhyme; Achille , a computer genius who, paradoxically with his name, suffers from asthma; Stella , marked by the early death of her father; Oscar , who can only breathe in a boxing ring; Caterina , who has understood that love as it is is what is needed; Ettore , who must be a parent to his own parents; Elisa , who loves to travel and who hates her body; Mattia , a slave to drugs and a lover of poetry like Rimbaud ; Aurora , who always looks for the positive side of things so as not to succumb to the darkness.
How characters evolve
But it is not only the boys who grow and change throughout the novel. Romeo too, listening to the universe that is born each time from the voices of these desperate young people, reflects on his own condition, on the choices he has made and on the unconditional love he feels for his wife, the one who showed him a new world at the moment in which he had lost the light. These reflections are reported, almost like a flow of thoughts, in a diary that creates an interval, a breath between the various months that precede maturity.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that school starts in September, nothing better represents the touching of the beginning and the end.”
In all this, the professor does not limit himself to giving voice to those who had never had one before, but he is committed to teaching science in a way that can shake the minds of the kids , leading them to question the world around them and that, at times, seems so hostile. The fact is that only when you intensely observe the mysteries of life, you can feel wonder and therefore hope for something brighter.
His way of conducting lessons and establishing a relationship with the children raises many doubts, both among parents and among the other teachers at the school. The latter seem almost more interested in academic performance and high grades in subjects rather than in the student as a person who must be cared for in order to flourish in the best possible way. They are in fact unaware of the lives, dreams and fears of the children they meet every day in their lessons.
The lack of interest in the inner life of children, however, emerges not only from the teaching staff but also from the parents themselves , too caught up in their own adult problems to notice those of their children.
Professor Romeo can only feel compassion for these parents who try to take stock of their lives by going to interviews, as if the judgment on their children could somehow demonstrate how much they have always believed, for better or for worse. But often the judgment does not match expectations and it is precisely there, in this discrepancy, that parents enter into crisis, not remembering that bringing a child into the world does not mean reproducing individuals equal to ourselves.
The children Elena, Cesare, Achille, Stella, Oscar, Caterina, Ettore, Elisa, Mattia, Aurora are instead deeply fascinated by the new professor, because they feel somehow listened to and understood.
Thanks to Romeo, they learned a lot about each other and about themselves. For this reason, they decided to spread the practice of the roll call throughout the school, to give everyone a means of communication and mutual listening .
The initiative spread like wildfire, with reprimands from the principal, disciplinary notes, and a crowd of journalists clogging the school’s phone lines to find out more about this whole story.
In the end, the boys from the ghetto class are even invited to meet the Minister . At that point the “revolution” seems to have truly taken place, so much so that the appeal ends up as the first news item on all the news programs.
The final exam
Finally, the one that everyone fears arrives: the final exam. With their baggage of life made of reflections, appeals and personal knowledge, these kids look at their exam no longer as a point of arrival, but rather as the beginning of what will be their journey in a world to be discovered.
They understand that what will remain for them will not be their final exam grades but all the days spent in that classroom together discussing with Professor Romeo.
Conclusion
“ L’appello ” by the writer Alessandro D’Avenia is, in conclusion, a novel that talks about school and adolescents, about training and learning. A novel that tries to shake up an institution in which, too often, the desires, dreams, and difficulties of students are neither listened to nor understood. But it is only by knowing how to listen to each other that we learn to see beyond, where our beliefs obscure our view.
D’avenia’s appeal: famous quotes
Here are some of the most beautiful and touching phrases from Alessandro D’Avenia’s novel:
- “The important thing is to have kept their names, nothing else, because every name we save is a piece of the world we save”
- “In these years, they are the ones who have forced me, sometimes painfully, to look where I didn’t know or didn’t want to look, because I had my ideas, my beliefs, my hypocrisies”
- “Faces are like maps, they contain the entire geography of the soul, places that need to be named and given a story. Pain, fatigue, fears, evil, good, rain, slaps, caresses, wind, tears, sleep, happiness: everything, day after day, gesture after gesture, sculpts and transforms that flesh”
- I think that’s what love is: showing your weakness to someone and discovering that they won’t use it to assert their strength, but on the contrary, to show themselves to be equally weak. Uniting two weaknesses is the way to become strong”
