Books & Reviews Archive

Delia’s father had always told her that her mother was dead, so much so that she has become a memory continually resurfacing in her mind. > I used to imagine how my mother would come back. (...) In all of these daydreams, death was not as absolute as it was supposed to be, and we always found each other by accident. In all of these daydreams, my mother and I recognized each other without a single word. Delia's life has unfolded peacefully, with a loving father and two friends: Fritz and Eric, the latter of whom Delia falls in love with as a girl and with whom she has a daughter. Her only torments are that ever-present feeling of having lost something and the fact that Eric is an alcoholic. Until, suddenly, the police show up at the house to arrest her father, Andrew, accused of having kidnapped his daughter twenty-five years earlier. The novel tackles many themes—perhaps too many: Andrew's deceit, having concealed the existence of her mother, Elise, from Delia; Eric's alcoholism, resurfacing under stress and upon discovering that Elise had also struggled with alcohol addiction; the dynamics between the three friends, Delia, Eric, and Fritz, the latter having always been in love with her (serving in the novel as a kind of guardian angel); the new surroundings where Delia moves with her daughter to attend the trial and where she meets Rutham, a blend of Native medicine woman and hippie grandmother; the harshness and brutality of the prison where Andrew is incarcerated; potential childhood sexual abuse, repressed by Delia but brought back to light by her father's accusations against Elise during the trial (perhaps yet another lie); and finally the trial itself, recounted with the standard American police-procedural approach. To impose order on such a sprawling narrative, a review must select a single thread, even at the risk of stripping away the plot's richness. One might begin with a curious question the Native medicine woman poses to Delia: > What if the whole kidnapping experience wasn't Delia's story? What happens if disappearing wasn't the most catastrophic event in your life? What else would it be? (asks Delia). Ruthman raises her face to the sun. "Coming back," she says. And indeed, Delia is not happy when she meets her mother; Elise, tears in her eyes, realizes this and tells Delia that she has lost her once again, and forever. Too vast is the divide between fantasy and reality! > My mythical, imaginary mother was a god and a superhero and a comfort to me. (...) It took me twenty-five years to be able to admit that I'm glad I didn't know my mother until now. Not because, as my father suspected, she might have ruined my life, but because this way, I didn't have to witness her ruining her own. As the author states, through Delia's voice, > What matters is not what you have accumulated over the years, but those few things you can carry with you. It is a pity that such a compelling theme—the confrontation between memory and reality—is compromised by a plot overcrowded with narrative threads, superfluous characters, and redundant episodes. Why depict prison life only to traffic in clichés, and why become entangled in the interpersonal dynamics of childhood friends transitioning into adulthood? It would have been far better to examine in psychological depth Delia’s discovery of her mother as well as the mother's own emotions, which remain perpetually relegated to the background until fading away entirely. Further accentuating its melodramatic potboiler quality is the now ubiquitous technique of multi-voiced narration: each chapter recounts the story from the perspective of a different character, generating a redundancy of the "I" (is one not enough?) that renders the whole enterprise long-winded, repetitive, and tedious. The novel's merit lies in its prose: a syntactic structure that is straightforward yet far from trivial, and an elegant vocabulary enriched by idioms, adjectives, and verbs drawn from colloquial speech, marked by a distinctly American cadence. Distant from New York intellectualism and the overwrought virtuosity of certain contemporary American authors (one need only think of the much-celebrated Cormac McCarthy; see the review of *The Road* on this site), Picoult returns us to a style accessible to the general reader. Why read it? The prose is engaging; the premise, potentially intriguing.

Maja and Klaas met in the editorial office of a provincial daily newspaper; their falling in love was accompanied by endless conversations and much reading, > their world was made of printed paper, of taking stances, analyses, written and oral reflections . The birth of three children forced Maja to dedicate herself to the family, abandoning her work. A prosaic life lies ahead, from which to derive a decorous pleasure, a love slowly turning into an affectionate friendship. Until three events change the couple's lives. Klaas discovers an unknown poet, Bernard Mork. He comes into possession of his poems and is captivated by them, particularly by the progression of the themes addressed: in *Morning Songs for Eve* there emerges an outburst of sensual ecstasy, such that to Klaas "his very existence suddenly seemed dry and barren"; in *Principles of Order* one witnesses a gradual return to self-control; and the *Letters to Baucis* are filled with an austere serenity. It is the story of a love affair between a man and a woman, a kind of *Canzoniere*, in which, along the long journey through existence, Petrarch moves from erotic fantasies about the beloved woman to a muted nostalgia for the sweetness of Laura's eyes, and finally to a fearful inwardness before impending death. But who is Bernard Mork? While Klaas is absorbed in this investigation, Maja undergoes another experience, equally comprehensive and mysterious. During a journey relocating to the Côte d'Azur, they have a car accident: Klaas must stay behind to wait for the car to be repaired, while Maja and the children continue on aboard a truck. > In the dim light of the dashboard, the truck driver beside her was a mountain of shadow (...), a giant, a superhuman force, who had taken them under his protection . In a state of near-unconsciousness, an "insignificant cog in that colossus on wheels," Maja listens to the truck driver’s stories. In all of them, mysterious women appear—apparitions or human beings, malevolent witches or lost creatures: in any case, swept away by the desire for death. If Klaas's quest still bears the semblance of reality, even as poetry fuels fantasy, the truck driver's tales belong to the realm of the imagination, perhaps to Maja's own nightmares. What is unquestionably real, yet indecipherable, is what occurs in the splendid villa on the Côte d'Azur. Owned by a wealthy Russian aristocrat, absent because constantly traveling, it is looked after by the caretaker, a suspicious and irascible man, repeatedly caught selling off the villa's valuable items. In particular, the children are forbidden from playing near a small shed: merely a tool shed, or the hiding place for something far more unsettling, such as the corpse of the wealthy Russian lady? The three narrative strands develop in parallel, culminating in the discovery of the poet’s true identity: Bernard Mork is a woman! But how does a woman write about eroticism, how does she recount her love affair? For Maja, the answer is simple: > in her poetry she was both man and woman. (...) But in order not to wrong her daughter, Eva, she was forced to change. It was a conscious choice. That is the reasoning of a mother, not of a poet > , replies Klaas, who then sinks into a literary dissertation. It would not be enough to listen to truck drivers' stories > to understand that the real theme is the strength of the woman who wants to become the protagonist, at least in poetry. The novel remains suspended, closing almost out of weariness. If we strive to offer a unified interpretation of a narrative fragmented into its three storylines, we might make this observation: three spheres coexist within all of us—the real world, the ideal, and the internal. In the real world there may be crimes, even if unsolved; there are characters and places, and therefore realist descriptions and the order of events; in the ideal world there are literature, philosophy, and so forth; in the internal world there are feelings, nightmares, and dreams. Wherever we attempt to position ourselves (for instance, Klaas in literature, Maja in dreams), it is difficult to defend against the imagination, for its paths are manifold. By chance while you sleep/by an involuntary movement of the fingers/I tickle you and you laugh/you laugh without waking/so pleased with your body you laugh/you approve of life even in sleep/like that day you told me:/let me sleep, I have to finish a dream" (Luciano Porta, from the collection *Invasioni*). A major Dutch writer, Haasse develops the story with prose that is simple, elegant, and effective. It makes for pleasant reading, as one gets lost in details that are meticulous and evocative; yet, on their own, they are unable to sustain a plot that is slender, jagged, and rambling. The relationship between Maja and Klaas remains in the background, left unexplored by the syntax and the words: it stands there motionless, each spouse enclosed within their own incommunicable self, despite the imagination. What the story fails to deliver might have been offered by narrative style; such is not the case. Why read it? Pleasant

> When a thing has passed, what distinguishes it, in the reality of the present, from an illusion or a fantasy? Even if it once had an existence of its own, thereafter it will have none, save in memory . The author reconstructs the American story of her grandfather, Diamante, and of his love for a girl, Vita. In the early years of the twentieth century, poverty and despair drove Italians to emigrate to the United States. Diamante, eleven years old, and Vita, still a child, journeyed to New York to join her father. The sea voyage and the grueling life in the New World forged an indissoluble bond between them—one that, as so often happens, never managed to crystallize into an enduring and stable relationship. The narrative unfolds in three parts. In the first part, entitled *“The Line of Fire,”* the author recounts the arrival of the two children in America and describes, in grim, harsh, and at times harrowing pages, the Italian immigrant milieu. Squalor and violence predominate. The Italians struggle to survive and send a few coins back to Italy. For Diamante and Vita, there is also the specific context in which they are forced to live: the sordidness and greed of the girl’s father; his mistress, the sole maternal figure for Vita, yet despised precisely for driving a wedge between her and her real mother, who remained in Italy; and their fellow countrymen who, brutalized by hard labor, frequent the boarding house run by Vita’s father. It could easily be a Dickensian narrative or a Zolaesque realist novel: it is neither. The episodes unfold as if in a succession of nightmares, accursed reveries, outward projections of the author’s own existential anxieties. Over everything looms the damned city, whose depiction recalls—in the imagery deployed and its emphatic style—D’Annunzio’s *Città terribili*. This part of the novel concludes dramatically: Vita sets fire to her father’s mistress in an attempt to kill her. In the second part, *“The Road Home,”* Vita’s son, serving as an American soldier on the Italian front during the Second World War, retraces the search for Diamante and his family. We then find ourselves in the Italy of the 1950s, where Vita, now an affluent widow and an established woman, comes to Rome to meet Diamante and ask him to live together. She meets with a tacit refusal: it is too late. In the third part, *“The Trickle of Water,”* the scene shifts back to America with Diamante and Vita, still young, but by then estranged. Vita, for her part, has betrayed Diamante, prompting the youth to flee in an attempt to forget her. When he returns to New York to board a ship bound for Italy, he asks her whether she wishes to leave as well. Yet by now the two young people are too far apart, their worlds irrevocably detached: “I like America, I'm fine here,” Vita thinks. Yet is this story a reconstruction based on documents and accounts from the protagonists, or is it rather the fruit of the author’s imagination? Diamante undoubtedly existed, but he was a taciturn, reserved man who disclosed little about his life. Of the girl, Vita, the writer found no trace, not even after a meticulous search through the parish archives of her native village. Perhaps the love between Diamante and Vita is merely an ideal, a wistful yearning, a blurred photograph—much like the one the author imagines the two youths having taken of themselves. > Their faces were a hesitant, blurry halo, as if at the very last moment they had preferred not to be captured, not to surrender the unrepeatable instant they were living to a dead memory. Diamante was a flash of black. Vita a blot of white. Their features superimposed and indistinguishable, as though they belonged to a single person . The core premise of the book is compelling. To narrate Italian emigration through the love of two characters: a childhood romance perpetually pursued and never realized, for no discernible reason. It is a pity that this idea is developed without a genuine narrative plot, ultimately proving discursive and fragmented. The style—dense with parenthetical clauses, overburdened with vocabulary and imagery—fails to impart vitality and allure to the narrative, which consequently remains stranded among disparate literary genres: family chronicle, social novel, and the imaginative quest for an existential and emotional trajectory of one's own. Why skip it? The reading experience is tedious and often ponderous. It does little to illuminate the phenomenon of Italian emigration. The love between Diamante and Vita lingers suspended and indistinct, never truly engaging the reader.

Giovanna, the first-person narrator, is an adolescent living in an affluent neighborhood of Naples with educated, left-wing parents: her father a university professor, her mother a high school teacher and translator. The couple of friends they spend time with shares the very same traits: he, too, an academic, a habitual partner in heated debates with the father; she, a woman of high society, ever elegant and often sporting a splendid bracelet. Then there are their daughters, Giovanna's friends and confidantes. A fine bourgeois family, in short! The girl begins to falter at school and overhears a remark made by her father at the door. > adolescence has nothing to do with it: she's taking on the face of Vittoria. (...) That was how, at twelve, I learned from my father's voice, muffled by the effort to keep it low, that I was becoming like his sister, a woman in whom—I had heard him say for as long as I could remember—ugliness and malice were perfectly matched . An irrepressible desire arises in Giovanna to meet Aunt Vittoria, so hated by the father that her image had been excised from a family photograph. She wanted to know whether her father’s harsh words were merely the result of a momentary vexation, or whether he, so astute, had detected > the traits of a future defect of mine. (...) I wanted to understand whether my aunt was truly emerging through my body: the exceedingly thick eyebrows, the eyes too small and of a lusterless brown, (...) the short upper lip with a repulsive dark fuzz, (...) the sharp chin and the nose, ah the nose, the way it thrust gracelessly toward the mirror, (...) were these already features of Aunt Vittoria’s face, or mine and mine alone? (...) Was I myself, or the vanguard of my aunt, she in all her horror? Giovanna does not realize that the journey she is embarking on—getting to know her aunt and her world (the working-class neighborhoods of Naples)—will not merely confirm or disprove the roots of her presumed ugliness: it will be a descent toward the demolition of her parents, the loss of her mother, and the estrangement of her father. The parental figures, previously seen as an Olympus of perfection and models to be emulated, crumble to the point of dissolution. > What was happening, then, in the adult world, in the heads of perfectly reasonable people, in their bodies laden with knowledge? What reduced them to animals among the most untrustworthy, worse than reptiles? It is not the discovery of the sordid affair binding the parents to the couple of friends: the father having for years taken his colleague's wife as a mistress, while the colleague in turn carries on with Giovanna's mother; nor is it the murky history of the bracelet worn so ostentatiously by the father's mistress: having come by hazy means to Aunt Vittoria, who intended it as a gift for Giovanna, only for the father to present it to his lover. It is words that devastate the end of childhood: the time of adolescence ought to be slow, > made of great gray blocks and sudden swellings of green or red or purple. The blocks have no hours, days, months, years, and the seasons are uncertain, it is hot and cold, rainy and sunny. (...) The moment you search for words, that slowness turns into a vortex and the colors blur together like different fruits in a blender . And so we arrive at the heart of the matter: the theme of culture. Unlike Confucius, who regarded culture as the key to grasping "the sense of mutual humanity," Elena Ferrante appears to share my view: a good formal education, command of language, familiarity with books and culturally engaged circles, are a cage that imprisons feelings, submerging them beneath skillful semantic play, fostering pretense rather than sincerity. The trouble is that Giovanna, while recognizing in Aunt Vittoria the prodigious force of candor (hatred voiced without filters, intimacy, overflowing emotions, the authenticity of living), nevertheless falls in love with an intellectual, captivated by his words as much as by his appearance. Culture, a false chimera! One does not know humanity through thought; one grasps it through empathy. Fortunately, Aunt Vittoria bursts in to save her. > Did you hear that, Giannì? Here they call you a child. But are you a child? Then why do you get between Giuliana and her boyfriend? Answer me, instead of busting my balls over the bracelet. Are you worse than my brother? Tell me, I’m listening: are you more arrogant than your father? The book is a coming-of-age novel. It is intriguing at the beginning, stoking the reader’s anticipation of Aunt Vittoria: the expectation of a temperamental, visceral, and full-blooded character. Instead, this figure remains sidelined, occasionally summoned into the plot but never a protagonist. The narrative unfolds—or rather, tumbles—along a banal storyline and a fragile cast of characters. Failing to lean on plot and characterization, on the complexity of their bonds as in *My Brilliant Friend*, the writing reveals all its limitations: fluent, yet feeble, devoid of grit, as superficial as the story itself. Why read it? Those who fell in love with *My Brilliant Friend* cannot miss it.