“I live like sole, on the seabed. My peers, on land: what can we say to each other?”
Teresa is a forty-seven-year-old teacher, stuck in the role of daughter for too long. She lives with her parents in a village never specified, subjected to the limit of perpetual humiliation by her mother Maria, and invisible to the eyes of Alzheimer’s which affects her father Piero. An environment, family and country, which tightens the deadly embrace twice on Teresa, who despite her age, she has not yet managed to blossom as a person.
The impossibility of making her voice heard both at school and at home convinces her to keep a diary, with which to confront, get involved and discover herself as a person, in an exit from delayed adolescence, like a Christmas tree removed from the living room in August.
Her incomplete emotional formation will make her confide to her diary her secret love for one of her former students, Alessandro, described as blond and very blond, who had left her life without warning, and then reappear for an accidental encounter. This much younger boy will be behind her every dream and future projections of Teresa, further testimony to the immaturity of the protagonist.
You find it hard to believe that this is the author’s debut novel, yet it is. The text has lived, and has a maturation usual to those who have a solid and usual literary career behind them, perhaps here Cai’s experience as a translator comes into play. The narrative register used is anything but comfortable or obvious; shines with unexpected intensity, an apparently dead-end street, but one that if you have the patience to get to the end, you understand that there is no end. History, as foreign as it may seem and far from what surrounds us, is so close that it could be ours, if only we were born in a different family context. Whoever writes these words has had the good fortune (?) to know many stories not too far from Teresa’s, it’s just a matter of luck. Unexpected surprise Marta Cai, whose new novel we are already waiting for, who will tell us if it is a flash in the pan, or a fire capable of warming generations and generations of readers.
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Marta Cai, Centomilioni, Einaudi, Torino, 2023