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https://www.positanonews.it/2020/02/positano-al-canada-enzo-florence-si-incontrano-20-anni-scrivere-un-fumetto/3360675/

​– Translate with the help of de DeepL.com Ñ

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De Positano au Canada. Enzo et Florence se rencontrent après 20 ans pour écrire une bande dessinée
par Redazione_LR - 04 février 2020 - 11h43

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Memories are the meaning of life, they become history, to be added to the infinite history of mankind [ ... ].

 

Fascinating work, reported by the newspaper Il Mattino, illustrated by Enzo Lauria from Salerno: illustrator, screenwriter, author of short animated films, with his Canadian friend Florence Bolté, screenwriter and author of [animathon], animated films  and children's books. They met twenty years ago at the Cartoon on the Bay festival in Positano where she was giving an [ Animathon workshop ] with her husband André Leduc, they never lost sight of each other and they met again recently during a stay in Spain. "With Florence, founder of the publishing house "Piroulì" in Quebec - confides Lauria - we decided to make a graphic novel about her family". Megan was born, a novel illustrated by the poignant taste of fairy tales and incisive simplicity (to be purchased on Amazon for the moment), a wonderful story of humanity for young people - as the two authors point out "from 9 to 100 years old and over".

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Sixty-seven pages that "gallop like the horses on a merry-go-round", like the whirlwind of tales of the effervescent Megan, at the top of her hundred years of age, which she throws to her great-grandson Pierrot. An intense bond is established between the child and the old woman, a graft of emotions that plants in the soul memories that become identities to be transmitted. There is a complicity between the curious little boy and the always attractive old woman with her bluish white hair attached to a ponytail and her big green eyes, who drinks sorbets and listens to Bizet's Carmen on the elegant Art Nouveau rocking chair overlooking the fragrant nasturtium garden. There is a complicity, yes - despite the third protagonist, always present but whose name is never pronounced: Alzheimer's disease.

 

"Pierrot - explain Lauria and Bolté - visits Megan , every week, his great-grandmother" of Creole origin, a woman who lived and loved a lot. From this loving and tender exchange between distant generations, fragments of life pass before our eyes". A more than adventurous life. Epochs and images follow one another. Between pleasure and reflection, in the wake of Bolté's dedication to her ancestors - "to those who sooner or later emigrated" - and which resounds like a warning to us, because as in all fairy tales that respect itself, there is a moral: there is no difference, we are all mestizos, a happy mixture of ethnicities and cultures. Our journey with Megan began in Java, in 1883: it was there that we met her future father, Portalis, a scientist forced to escape the terrible cataclysm of Krakatoa. He landed in Haiti, the pearl of the West Indies, where he fell in love with Julia. Here is Megan with her sisters, here is the little carnival girl dressed as a dinosaur, tiger, elephant or lion cub, then fifteen years in lido with her peers, nights of dancing and love at first sight for an airplane pilot. Here they are flying in the sky by parachute, dreaming of landing in the wild savannah. She will not marry her Jules, too transgressive, but the rigid Georges imposed by her parents; four children will be born, she will leave him out of boredom, eager to fly again with her imagination. And, thanks to Lauria's watercolors, soft as a cloud, and her dreamy line between Chagall and Fellini, we too will fly away with Megan and Pierrot to distant and exotic places.

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