“The rain washed away the summer. It soaked the earth, and from the earth rose clouds laden with moisture that scattered among the rocks and enveloped the crests.”
If you are looking for a narrative built on twists and turns or intriguing actions then this is not the right book. Time passes slowly, expanding like an accordion to its maximum extension, just to play a single note. A book to read from a stylistic point of view, a good exercise, but which, if it had been “dirtier”, would have had an extra gear.
We are in the mountains of northern Italy, sheltered inside a refuge first in the chaos of the summer season and disposable tourists, and then in the uncomfortable solitude of the winter one.
The protagonist, eponym of the title, is a young girl, daughter of the big city (Turin specifically) who decides to leave some family comforts, to go and find herself, and her own path in life.
A period of emotional and personal growth that everyone faces sooner or later, thirsty to accumulate experiences and to become somehow independent, cutting the umbilical cord with their roots, which keep us firm on a terrain that we know by heart and has nothing else to offer. In this context the protagonist (Beatrice) becomes strangera (foreigner) both towards her past and towards her present and the inhabitants of the mountain.
The confusion of the protagonist could very well be that of the writer, who we think are the same age, and we wonder how much autobiographical there is in the text; this is not meant to be a point against the story, but an observation on a passage common to many first works.
A text certainly well structured in the words used, in the descriptive part and in the times, but equally lacking in the character definition of the characters. We were unable to empathize with any of them. Perhaps it is a deliberate choice to leave more space for the mountain setting, in line with the character of the people who live there? Or none of this? We look forward to reading a second novel by the writer, to understand where her pen will be able to arrive.
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Marta Aidala, La strangera, Guanda, Milano, 2024