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Winnipeg Free Press
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Past and present traumas
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. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Telegraph
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A chilling crime in Italy is decoded, 20 years later
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.
