The plot of "Maya"
It begins with a man who leaves. Not because he wants to discover the world, but because he no longer knows how to stay. From Rome to Istanbul, then Kabul, finally India: a journey back into one’s own darkness, through the tired body, the dust, the heat, the smoke, the smell of the river. Maya is the raw and moving diary of a descent—or perhaps an enlightenment—recounted, forty-five years later, by the same man, who survived loss, psychiatry, shame, and desire. Time tangles around memories and obsessions, up to the name of a woman: Maya, body and symbol, promise and abyss. In precise and visionary language, Matteo Della Rovere dramatizes male fragility without rhetoric: the fear of contact, the hunger for meaning, the clumsiness of desire, the ambiguity of addictions, the pity and confusion that accompany every fall.
Review
Maya by Matteo della Rovere is a novel that grabs you by the throat from the first pages and does not let you go. Set in the torrid and contradictory India of the seventies, it tells the story of Sandro, a fragile and tormented young Italian who flees Italy and its inner demons to get lost in the dusty streets of Benares. What he finds is not the spiritual peace promised by the sacred city, but an impossible and devastating love that will drag him into a vortex from which he will never be able to escape. Della Rovere’s writing is direct, almost brutal in its honesty. Through the pages of Sandro’s travel diary and then through the memories narrated decades later, we witness a story that continuously oscillates between tenderness and restlessness, between moments of pure beauty and abysses of moral degradation. The India of the novel is not the glossy one of the tourist guides: it is a country of violent contrasts, unbearable heat and pouring rains, of extreme poverty and ostentatious wealth. In this almost hallucinatory scenario, the relationship between Sandro and Maya is consumed. What makes this novel so powerful is its moral ambiguity. No character is completely innocent or completely guilty. Sandro is both victim and accomplice, Maya is enigmatic and elusive, Kumar is tyrannical but also tragically human. Della Rovere forces us to question what it really means to love, how far we can go to follow our desires, where the boundary lies between passion and self-destruction. The ending has the devastating force of great tragedies. Maya is a brave, uncomfortable novel that does not seek easy consolation. It is the story of a sick love in a context where everything is ambiguous, where spirituality borders on squalor and where every gesture has irreversible consequences. A book that will continue to resonate in the reader’s mind long after the last page.
Paolo Marussig, film director