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Rating: By pure chance, I found myself reading "The Accidental Woman", the debut work of Jonathan Coe. After quickly consuming "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" by Carver and "If This Is a Man" by Primo Levi (someday I'll need to write something about this book), I began to rummage through the heaps of books decorating the shelves of the rented house for the holidays. Among the evergreen summer mystery novels and mega-tomes of adventure/spy stories, Coe's first book immediately piqued my intellect, especially thanks to the good memories I had of "The Winshaw Legacy" (a little gem that I highly recommend).
Alright, The Accidental Woman, you’re mine! Morning, beach, sunbed, kids at a safe distance, and frenzied reading interspersed with long swims to assimilate Maria's life at its crucial points: her time at Oxford, the marriage, the birth of her child, her family life, the breakdown of the marriage, her cosmic crisis... I am accompanied step by step by the author who, by inserting into the story a hypothetical narrator as intangible as a camera, presents us with British wit and sarcasm, the sterile and apathetic soul of the protagonist, a woman like many others (the same could be said for a man) who undergoes life, unable to handle "chance". Maria fails to seize educational opportunities, work ones, and cannot value human and romantic relationships. A real disaster of a woman!
A cynical and cold novel, much like the life it tackles, with a sparse plot without any kind of explosions and a protagonist so inept you want to slap her (but, on so many occasions, how many slaps would many of our dear loved ones deserve?), an inability to live life fully that would have greatly pleased our dear Italo Svevo. With "The Accidental Woman" from 1987, Jonathan Coe presents to the world his particular style, his great ability to construct a complex yet very fluid prose, sharp and ironic as only an Englishman could do.
Not an indispensable book nor a masterpiece of the 20th century, a hundred and fifty pages that flow quickly, that make you think, and in which it is easy to identify. A work where the squalor of everyday life is as horrifying as Maria's "alien" psychology. A story that doesn't seek the reader's empathy nor easy pity. Maria's life like a thousand others, empty and without sparks. A read that, at most, might kindle the soul of its reader with difficulty.
Inside me, I can still feel the slight warmth of a small candle's flame and hope it lasts long...
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