Past and present traumas

Winnipeg Free Press

5 days ago

Although this short, potent novel draws on a real-life double murder that occurred in the mountains of Italy's Abruzzo region in the 1990s, The Brittle Age does not read like a typical crime thriller.
Donatella Di Pietrantonio's fifth novel — which won the 2024 Strega Prize, Italy's most important literary award — moves fluidly back and forth through time, intense but elliptical, subtly unravelling the effects of violence on individual lives, on a community, even on the land itself.
Narrator Lucia, a physiotherapist recently separated from her husband, lives in Pescara. Her college-age daughter, Amanda, had been studying in Milan. Once eager to move away and start her own life, Amanda has returned home during the COVID-19 pandemic after being robbed and beaten outside her apartment.
The Brittle Age
Amanda now stays in her room, barely eating, rarely washing. Lucia finds her daughter unreachable. They hardly speak. 'Even a look from me can annoy her,' she says.
Eventually, though, the reader starts to suspect that Lucia struggles to deal with Amanda's trauma because she has never dealt with her own.
Over 20 years ago, when Lucia was the same age as Amanda is now — 'the brittle age' of the title — two young women were murdered and another wounded near a campground in the impoverished rural area where Lucia lived with her parents.
Though it's hard at first for Lucia to look directly at this event, the terrors of that night gradually come out.
At the foot of the mountains ominously called Il Dente del Lupo ('the wolf's teeth'), law enforcement officers and men from the nearby village look for three missing women, including Doralice, Lucia's childhood friend. The teenaged Lucia waits, overwhelmed with guilt and fear. Doralice might have been with Lucia that evening instead of at the campground, except that Lucia went to the beach with her new city friends, ashamed of Doralice's country dialect and not wanting to bring her along.
The account of the crime and its aftermath — the search-and-rescue operation, the arrest, the trial — is interspersed with Lucia's current mid-life concerns. Gradually, we learn of Lucia's difficult relationship with her taciturn elderly father, who now lives alone in the hills, the tensions with her estranged husband, the feelings of helplessness as she watches her daughter, unable to connect.
Through Lucia's somewhat cool first-person narrative, Di Pietrantonio suggests these present-day problems might actually be related to Lucia's past, that the murders marked Lucia in ways she is only now starting to realize.
There are universal issues here. The novel is about the tensions between mothers and daughters, about the way children's lives move beyond their parents. 'Children — there are so many ways of losing them,' Lucia thinks at one point. Lucia feels that through education, a profession and life in the city, she has escaped the hardscrabble existence of her own mother. Now she is baffled that Amanda seems to be deliberately turning her back on the middle-class privileges for which Lucia worked so hard.
Leonardo Cendamo photo
Di Pietrantonio's short, shifting chapters and plain words, often abrupt and tense, hide a dark and complicated poetry in her novel which, at its core, is about crimes against women.
But woven into these dynamics is fear. Lucia comes to see that while Amanda has healed physically from her attack, there is a deeper wound: 'Her trust in the world had been ripped away from her.' She realizes her own trust ended that night all those years ago, when she realized that no place was safe. As the prosecutor of the case says, 'Wherever man goes, he can bring evil.'
At its core, The Brittle Age is about crimes against women, but Di Pietrantonio is careful to avoid the problems often seen in the true-crime genre. She refuses to sensationalize, to speculate, to over-explain.
She uses short, shifting chapters and plain words, often abrupt and tense, that hide a dark and complicated poetry. (The translator is Ann Goldstein, the English translator for Elena Ferrante.)
Looking obliquely at the long shadows cast by violence, The Brittle Age is both harrowing and guardedly hopeful.
Alison Gillmor writes on pop culture for the Free Press.
Alison GillmorWriter
Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
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