“I grew up with my mother, not with my father.”
Finalist of the XXVI edition of the Edoardo Kihlgren Opera Prima Literary Prize, the text is a family story, in which the author goes fishing in the lake of his dearest memories, what he remembers and what he thought he didn’t remember, to tell the story of his life up to now, and the internal dynamics between his parents and then those with his brothers and those with his various girlfriends. A successful attempt to come to terms with the past, and especially with his self as a child and a boy, who with purity of soul was ashamed of something for which he would have had nothing to be ashamed of.
A text halfway between an autobiography and a memoir, in which the author tells what it meant to him to be the son of a Jehovah’s Witness, through well-defined moments, like paintings hanging on the wall that come to life when seen from a particular angle.
The author tells how since he was a child he has lived a constant dichotomy of feelings, on one side his religious father and on the other an atheist mother, within the perimeter of an extended family (both parents were remarried, after marriages from which they had other children).
We found the theme interesting, told in a clean way, capable of breaking down stereotypes towards a religious community that we all see and know, but no one really knows. A look from the inside, but without exaggerating. It is no coincidence that the most beautiful passages, in our opinion, are those in which the author feels uncomfortable telling his various girlfriends and friends about his father’s religion, and at the same time feels remorse for having denied Jehovah in whom he somehow seems to believe regardless of paternal pressure.
Linear writing, fresh in its classicism, without particular edges, but at the same time capable of keeping the reader’s interest alive. A look at contemporaneity is given for example by a series of short dialogues (like those of quick telephone messages), which despite not fully falling into our tastes, gave new speed to the text when it risked slowing down. Classicism is the cleanliness of the writing, without discordance and linear.
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Paolo Valoppi, Mio padre avrà la vita eterna ma mia madre non ci crede, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2024