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Rating: There is a before and an irreversible after, a cruel watershed, determined by the day the tragedy occurred. The point of no return. There is no reprieve for those who have experienced a sudden and incomprehensible loss, who must not only bear the weight of such a great void but also find a justification for an immeasurable loss. Can one make amends to others and oneself for something so invaluable, lost forever?
The tragedy irreparably marks the stories of all those who revolved around Stella, and who benefited from the purity of her joy, her contagious beauty. Of that girl who was becoming a young woman but lost her life in an accident and never became an adult, just as none of the other characters will become, or be able to be. From the day of her accident, everything crumbles, withers. A true processing of grief will never occur; not coincidentally, there are, for example, no references to the place where Stella is buried. No one in the novel visits her grave.
Bianca, Stella's sister, will never be told a fairy tale again. Her mother will try, on the day of the first anniversary of the tragedy, but will not finish the reading. Shortly after, she will go to the bathroom to try to take her own life. But even this will become a habit. She will end up catatonic in front of one of the televisions that now occupy all the rooms, because the narcotic and incessant entertainment offers her at least the illusion of comfort in the deafening silence of the void.
The emotional value is the novel of a guilt with indeterminate contours, which finds resolution only in the final pages, but it ultimately does not matter whether this burden is due to real or supposed guilt; what fuels it is the fact that there can be no atonement. The living drag themselves, only learning better how to die each day, renouncing affection, because only what is dead seems alive, and each comes to terms with this emptiness as they can. Bianca has learned to do so in an implacable way; even if she apparently hasn't lost control (some verses from "She's lost control" by Joy Division mark the epigraph of the novel), she is the one who has lost it the most. Bianca stands only because she is upheld by her obsessions, her compulsive disorders, maintaining control because she exercises it over everything material. Starting with the purchase of objects only to immediately make trash lists and throw them away, in the illusion of being able to accompany their end, desired precisely because they will outlive her, everyone. In search of a relationship with a man bearing the perfect genetic heritage, which she will find in a world-renowned heart surgeon, useful for carrying out that mad plan of reclaiming Stella's shattered life by desperately trying to generate another.
Bianca will be just an oxymoron, the darkest possible survival of a tragedy. There is no longer any residue of love in her; she will no longer be able to give even a drop, yet I have felt so much reading her story. Bianca, who has everything that would potentially make her a winning girl, who is brilliant and sharply intelligent, but who has become nothing but the black hole of her Stella who is no more. An empty, icy shell of cynicism and sarcasm, whose survival has demanded the renunciation of any feeling.
The theme of guilt is the common thread that unites many others: that of illness, family, couple relationships, obsessions, maternity as redemption, the deep shadow zones of each character. The construction of Liliana's character, in particular, intrigues due to its being absolutely non-rhetorical. Liliana is a disabled woman who for this reason demands compensation from the world. Filled with envy and resentful, she is a true manipulator and architect of emotional blackmail that will lead to the development and evolution of the story.
The style of Nicoletta Verna is personal, unsettling, magnetic. The narration of the novel, elaborate and coherent, built on two timelines, not only captures; it enchants. So dazzling that it's incredibly surprising that this is only a debut, from this author who works in communication and web marketing in the publishing sector. A debut that finds possible justification only in the consideration that its gestation was long and saw several drafts. Published by Einaudi, a finalist in the XXXIII edition of the Premio Calvino, it has already been awarded a Special Mention by the Jury. The hope is that such a talent will soon express itself in new narrative forms of this caliber.
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