The illustrious Elena Ferrante may have paved the way for a new generation of female novelists among her sisters, with her tetralogy begun by The prodigious friend over a decade ago. Still, three recently published novels tell us with the same poignant intensity the torturous fate of adolescent girls in this Italy absent from postcards, in the early 2000s and during the 1980s.
Posted at 8:00 a.m.
The young author Giulia Caminito appeared on our radar when her excellent novel came out last year A day will come. Its new title, The water in the lake is never sweettakes us to the outskirts of Rome, at the dawn of the new millennium.
The narrator grows up in the precariousness of unsanitary housing or allocated by the municipality. Between a mother always ready to go to the front to demand justice and who struggles to do housework to earn a living, a father in a wheelchair since a work accident on a construction site, where he worked moonlighting, and an anarchist brother , she reads to educate herself and find a path different from that of her family.
But his efforts constantly come up against the invisible walls of his social condition; to succeed in this society still attached to the privileges of birth, she must swallow her jealousy and her pride in front of her more fortunate classmates, silence her fury and her bitterness in the face of betrayals, disappointments and humiliations. Unforgettable, this gripping novel is a punch against injustice and a middle finger against privilege that certainly places the author among the feathers to follow.
The water in the lake is never sweet
Giulia Caminito, translated from Italian by Laura Brignon
Gallmeister
352 pages
Between poverty and violence
With Blessed be the father, Rosa Ventrella also explores this question of social emancipation. Is it possible to free oneself from the material and intellectual poverty which is transmitted from one generation to another?
blessed be the father recounts the misery of a poor neighborhood in the heart of the port city of Bari, through the life of Rosa, who grew up in the 1980s. forgotten, withdrawn into itself, like the neighborhoods of Naples depicted by Elena Ferrante, where women have the impression of being the helpless victims of an atavistic curse. The author had also been baptized “the Elena Ferrante of Bari” at the publication of her moving first novel, A proper familythree years ago.
It is a hard and dark novel which is revealed here in parallel with the solitary adolescence of Rosa, silent spectator of the violence inflicted by her father on her mother and the brutality of an environment that she only dreams of fleeing. . Unable to keep a job, this father nicknamed “Angel Face” sows terror in his own family; the money is short, the blows rain down and the local gossips are never too far away to gossip. Thus emerges the moving fight of a young woman to try to extract herself from her destiny and not to make the same mistakes as those that preceded her.
blessed be the father
Rosa Ventrella, translated from Italian by Anaïs Bouteille-Bokobza
Stopovers
256 pages
Friendship in all its excesses
Like Giulia Caminito, the novelist Silvia Avallone, who had great success with her previous novels, also takes us to the Italy of the early 2000s. A friendship retraces the fusional relationship between two teenagers who grow up in the provinces, witnesses of the digital revolution that is taking shape with the advent of the Internet.
We wander with them between Piedmont and Tuscany, then in Bologna, the mountains and the beaches in watermark. It is an excessive friendship that we discover between two teenage girls who are opposites: one is exuberant and only dreams of shining – a prodigious friend, in a way –, while the other hides in books in trying to stay invisible.
It is impossible not to be caught up in the virulence of this writing which embodies the impetuosity and ardor inherent in this shattering passage from childhood to adulthood, and which places this new title in the tradition of the novels of learning essentials – just like the two previous titles.
A friendship
Silvia Avallone, translated from Italian by Françoise Brun
Liana Levi
528 pages