“If they had loved me, maybe I would have been beautiful too.”
We weren’t ready to read such a beautiful book. We weren’t physically or emotionally ready. A full-throttle dive into melancholy, with no desire to climb back up. Some passages moved us like we hadn’t in a long time; but this shouldn’t make you think it’s a sad book. It’s a text capable of opening the heart like a child, letting in all the good and bad of the world.
The Italian-French writer trawls through her memory, and memories of her childhood emerge—hopefully adapted given the rawness of what she tells.
The protagonist is, in fact, a fourteen-year-old named Galla, torn between the countryside and the city, burdened by shame over her family, social, and economic situation, which influences her way of relating to others.
Despair begets more desperation, and the world around Galla becomes hostile: the nature surrounding her house near the swamp, the teachers who mistreat her, the classmates who denigrate her, with the exception of one young girl, Fanny, with whom she develops a sincere friendship.
Every step forward for her becomes an ultimate conquest, wrested with the teeth, even if this later causes her to experience devastating feelings of guilt. First and foremost, the decision to attend a high school far from home, which will forever strain her relationship with her mother; her relationship with her father, on the other hand, will never be a good one, accustomed to communicating only through violence. Here comes the involution of normal human relationships, with the elderly family dog, Daisy, capable of indirectly mothering her more than her mother, incapable (and therefore complicit?) of rebelling against her husband’s violence against her and their daughters.
Galla’s three worlds—home, school, and nature—are thus inhospitable, and she sometimes hopes to escape only through death, even though she may not truly desire it.
A book that should be read before any other text you currently have in your hands, and one that we also recommend as a gift, because beautiful things are always meant to be shared.
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Inès Cagnati, Giorno di Vacanza, Adelphi, Milano, 2023
Original Edition: Le jour de congé, Denoël, Paris, 1973