A chilling crime in Italy is decoded, 20 years later

Telegraph

30-03-2025

Donatella Di Pietrantonio's fifth novel is about a historic crime and its effect, over several decades, on a southern Italian community. At first, The Brittle Age seems likely to be one of those narratives, fashionable in literary fiction at the moment, that are principally about mood: we sense the weight of the crime, but its details are guessed and groped at until they come starkly into view in the last part of the book. That gradual accretion of clues combines with wider ideas – about the gulf between generations, the antipathy of rural Italy to the city, the vulnerability of young women everywhere – to produce a novel that's both a thriller and an absorbing exploration of evolving Italian values.
The crime is inspired by real-life events. Twenty years earlier, at a campsite on the ominously named Dente del Lupo ('wolf's teeth') mountain in the Apennines, two girls were murdered and a third left for dead. The novel's narrator, Lucia, was closely connected to these events because her father owned the campsite land, and his friend managed it. She also knows the young woman who survived, Doralice, and, we discover, should have been with her on the afternoon the crime took place.
But Lucia had opted not to invite Doralice on a beach excursion with some fellow students, because she was embarrassed by her friend's country accent and gauche mannerisms. Two decades later, during the 2020 pandemic, Lucia wonders about those instincts both as a friend and as a mother: she now has a 20-year-old daughter, Amanda, who has dropped out of university and become a recluse at home for reasons she can't fathom.
The novel is woven through with connections and parallels. Amanda, it turns out, has also been the victim of an attack – a mugging, in Milan. She was 'lucky' it was only a robbery, Amanda's housemate says, as though rape is in the normal course of things for women. Pulsing through the novel is a similar, general sense of fear, of violence, of outsiders, of societal change and even of nature, since there's a suggestion that the young women could have been attacked by wolves. And so it's unclear to which of the two time frames the 'brittle age' refers. In Italian the title is 'L'età fragile'. 'A fragile age' could also apply to the young women at the story's heart.
Translation is fraught with such choices and nuances. Ann Goldstein 's method, which is generally to stick very close to Italian vocabulary and syntax, complicates this otherwise rewarding read. There are some unusual word choices (a sheep has 'breasts' rather than 'udders') and sentences that seem oddly inverted. That said, Goldstein's translations of books by Elena Ferrante, herself an admirer of Di Pietrantonio, have been hugely successful, and Di Pietrantonio deserves success, too, for this intricate and subtle novel.