The Black Swan

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This opening of the novel leads the naive reader to believe they are facing the story of a girl, with “a face like so many others,” searching for herself in the Milan of the 1980s—an up-and-coming, aggressive city greedy for money.
A suspicion should arise from the young woman’s improbable name: Arlette, the byline of an advice column in a periodical titled Dialoghi dʼamore.
All the same, the novel’s clever literary construction would seem promising: the present is narrated by Arlette, while the events that led to today—the 1940s and 1950s—are written in the third person, thereby distinguishing Arlette’s discovery of her life as the fruit of the past from the objective narration of the facts and figures that shaped that past.
As one reads on, one realizes that this initial impression is an illusion: we are faced with a missed opportunity.
The plot is so far-fetched as to become banal.
The setting is the Lombard upper-middle class, forever teetering between Milan and Switzerland.
At the beginning of the 1940s, Edison is a shrewd, unscrupulous entrepreneur; with the money of his wife, whom he cheats on repeatedly and openly, he has built a publishing empire.
He has an affair with a young female writer, who leaves him when Edison refuses to publish a novel of hers.
The wife, instead of following the mistress’s example and leaving her husband, bears it patiently: for the love of her children, like any good mother? out of self-interest, like any good daughter of the bourgeoisie? We will never know, for the novel utterly lacks any character depth.
Edison’s wife has a brief affair as well, though not with an ordinary person—none other than a monsignor.
When we return to the present, we learn that Arlette is the daughter of Edison’s mistress and has had an affair with Edison’s son.
Don’t panic! We are not dealing with incest, because Arlette was fathered by another man; even if Casati Modignani has a penchant for the sordid and the morbid (in one episode, children peek through a peephole at women urinating), there is a limit for a respectable bourgeois writer! From Arlette’s love affair a baby girl was born, heiress to the great publishing empire following her father’s suicide, committed, of course, in an exceptional setting: a suite at the Grand Hotel in Rimini.
This brief synopsis offers a taste of a story fraught with intrigue—the kind that ought to surprise us, but instead falls completely flat, because after just a few pages the naive reader realizes that anything is possible.
Boredom sets in; but what irks most is the worldview: the male figures are mature, wealthy, powerful men; the female figures are fragile women resigned to a subordinate role, constantly in search of a lover or husband who can provide security and, naturally, a comfortable life.
Are there no young men to fall in love with? Marriage is a peaceful harbor, where one sees not

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One dreams of an ordinary life, far from the intrigues of a bourgeoisie ravenous for power and money, while still enjoying its perks.

There is nothing wrong with writing about the upper-middle class; what rankles, perhaps, is the shallowness with which the author handles dramatic and momentous events, such as the Second World War and the Resistance—the latter’s depiction steeped in platitudes.
What cannot be excused, however, is the vacuity of the characters and the thinness of the settings (the descriptions of drawing rooms and gardens resemble those of interior decorators, cold and impersonal).
Casati Modignani cites a nineteenth-century poet and educator:

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That may be true, but one must give voice to people, to characters; one must speak of their feelings and their stories, not merely ones fashioned out of intrigue, power, luxury, and money.

Why avoid it? It is truly dreadful! Insignificant, tedious, and superficial.