"Miryam and Yosep. The nativity novel" by the Italian writer Paolo Ballardini

Benevento, Campania May 31, 2023 (Issuewire.com) - A myth does not necessarily correspond to the facts. Sometimes it reworks events that actually took place, sometimes it passes off human needs as history that have found expression in allegories and imaginary events. You contribute to a myth by adding your own version to that of the thousands of storytellers who have gone before us.
Far from being the definitive truth, each new attempt amplifies some aspect of the story, creates new ones, and manipulates them for the benefit of a specific audience or need.

Continuous reinvention reinforces the myth, maintaining its freshness in changing historical and cultural conditions.
Dogma, on the other hand, limits its potential: everything there is to know is contained in the definitive version, and so it's up to interpretation to keep the myth alive.
Miryam and Yosep narrate the life of Jesus' parents in the few years of conception, nativity, and flight to Egypt and amplify their human dimension. The lovers of religious orthodoxy will be disappointed by the novel, which provides a different version of the events sealed in dogma.

Paolo Ballardini narrates from the point of view of the protagonists the life of Jesus' parents in the few years of the conception, nativity, flight into Egypt, and return to his native village. The story re-elaborates the myths narrated in the canonical Gospels, in the Apocrypha, and in the first Christian apologetic literature. Miryam is a teenager and a dreamer and spent her childhood in the orphanage of the Herodian Temple of Yerushalayim. At the age of twelve, the child's fertility approaching, the priests send for her countryman Yosep, a mature and practical worker, and this is how the two get married. The story unfolds in the most important biblical places, touching Natzrath, a village loyal to tradition in the remote province of Galileia.

Religious and very ancient myths, taken up in the Old Testament and later in Christian fiction will be the cornerstones of the novel, all embellished by careful research of the context: geographical, historical, religious, and cultural that provides readers with a realistic background to the narrative. With this book, the author aims to transform us, readers, into ancient and contemporary characters to the protagonists, rather than transforming the protagonists of the story into modern-minded characters, as Hollywood usually does. A book to read at any time of the year.

Paolo Ballardini is a writer and traveler. Born in Milan, he lives in London. He is passionate about history, epics, and the history of religions, he has visited the biblical places of the Middle East four times. He has lived and worked in Brazil, Great Britain, Italy, Mexico, Holland, Spain, and the United States. He lives and writes in London, where he holds a Master's in Creative Writing from the University of Roehampton. With his novels by him, the author immerses the reader in a different culture, contemporary or distant in time, taking him to the places he has carefully researched. His surreal tales and his fairy tales are rooted in real situations, but make the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary probable. His travel stories describe emotions and experiences lived in the first person, through which the reader can identify himself. In Italian he has published: The Solitude of Ulisse (1999); Passages (2002); Inconvenient ways to Eden (2017); The Princess with a Tail (2017); In the Hereafter (2018); Two Men (2019) and the essay Two Men. Facts Characters and History (2019); Forever (2019); The Collection of surreal short stories The fortuitous meeting of a sewing machine and an Umbrella on an operating table (2020); Miryam and Yosep. The Romance of the Nativity (2022) and the essay Man Creates God (2022). While his English bibliography includes: Far Beyond the Castle (2016); Fairy Tail (2017); What Lies Beyond and Other Stories (2017); That Moment (2018); Two Men (2019); Forever (2019).