What troubles me, as I sit down to write a few words introducing this book, is how few people will read it. I wish many more would—not to do Margherita a favor, though she'd certainly be pleased (especially with the sales), but because it's a beautiful book. I wish it would reach the teenagers who browse station newsstands, the people who spend long hours at home (time stolen from the television), or students whose teachers recommend it to them.
Perhaps that's just a dream. The truth is people care very little, and poorly, about anyone who is merely a "trap"—someone like Anna, who can't do anything right. Maybe it's just ignorance. But with this book, they could at least come to know Anna.
Anna is Margherita's daughter; a "different" daughter who doesn't follow the normal path of growing up. From her earliest years, she bewilders, grieves, confuses, and shocks with her behavior, her silence, her outright refusal of the world.
When the book begins, Anna is already grown. She lives alone with Margherita, ever since her father died—"perhaps of a broken heart"—ever since her sister Elena married. Elena, the older sister who buffered Anna against the outside world for so long (we can almost see her, frantic and tearful, dragging her "different" sister home from school, a source of rejection for Elena too).
Margherita could not heal Anna, could not make her speak, could not give her the "normal" life she desperately wanted. And now, in this solitude, she performs what seems to me a small great miracle. She gives Anna a new life.
She lends Anna her voice. And so Anna moves across these pages, she tells her own story, she emerges clear and whole. We follow the arc of her existence: her confusion, her lack of understanding, her refusal, her turbulence. And finally, a kind of acceptance—acceptance of a life, her life, that doesn't fit the ordinary mold.
Is the pain and confusion Anna or her mother's? Or is it ours, penetrating our hearts and minds as we read?
The pages move quickly, sometimes full of poetry, sometimes of anger; full of suffering, but also of humor. There are episodes, encounters, small scenes. There are judgments, comments, reflections—all in a direct, concentrated form that makes the reading easy and brings the characters and world vividly to life.
After those first turbulent, terrible years, Anna emerges in her youth as someone who has finally found her own peace, her own place. When I saw her at the book's presentation, she sat composed and serene, legs crossed on her chair, absorbed in playing with her "string games." Hi Anna, I said, and I saw a fleeting smile appear—as if she were answering my greeting.
There's one chapter I love less—the one about politicians. It's very brief. Not because what's written there isn't true; but precisely because it's too true, almost obvious, beneath the level of the other chapters with their disillusioned, vivid, aching pages—pages that are anything but obvious, meant to surprise and delight.
Goodbye, Anna. I wish I could write well enough to convince so many people to buy your book, because that's the only way to know you—and knowing you is also learning to love you.
- Lucia Bertolini, 1996
===FINE===