We read “The Fragile Age” by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, a tragedy, of men and places

En Italy, “The Fragile Age” received the Strega and Strega Giovani prizes. He is the equivalent, in France, of Erik Orsenna, doubly rewarded with the Goncourt and the Goncourt des lycéens in 1988 for “The Colonial Exhibition”. “Writing, more than anything else, allows me to be who I have not been. And it’s beautiful,” writes Donatella Di Pietrantonio. Even when she also draws her inspiration from who she was.

The weight of remorse

This fragile age is that of a 20-year-old student, Amanda, echoing the youth of her mother Lucia, marked by a terrible news story. It is also that of the victims of this tragedy, three young girls, two of whom died, attacked by a Macedonian shepherd in the Maiella valley, in August 1997. Lucia, the heroine of this novel, knew them. She was with them a few minutes before they left with this friendly young man who offered to take them home. Still blames himself, for what? She doesn’t know it, and above all, until now, she has never been able to put this suffering into words. This news item remained in the memories of Abruzzo and all of Italy under the name of Morrone’s crime. “Every moment of our lives fell into a before or after, without there being any need to mention the drama. »

One day, Lucia climbs with her father past the beech forest, at the edge of this part of the mountain that winter rarely leaves. There is an old campsite in ruins there, behind a gate rotten by brambles. This is the place of misfortune.

Between the desires of her father and the distress of her daughter, her choice is made

No one has set foot there since the tragedy, and the father has never managed to sell it. Lucia doesn’t want it. He wants to make a donation to her. The young woman is especially concerned by the return of her daughter, silent, wild, to whom she wants to “give back the world”. Between her father’s desires and her daughter’s distress, her choice is made.

The evidence of Abruzzo

But ultimately, the subject of Donatella Di Pietrantonio is not so much the memory of these facts as what they reveal about an irremediably patriarchal society. And the grandiose and wild beauty of Abruzzo – this nature which “grows back on tragedies and disasters” – which has nourished, since 2017, the powerfully lyrical work of this astonishing writer, who lives between the mountains and the Adriatic Sea, in Abruzzo , Of course.

A children’s dentist, she did not leave her profession to devote herself to writing, despite the successes she has enjoyed since “L’Arminuta” (“The Revenue”), published when she was approaching fifty. “L’Arminuta”, Campiello Prize and Napoli Prize, sold 400,000 copies and was adapted for the cinema by Giuseppe Bonito (2021). But the author, not greedy for notoriety, prefers informal meetings with her readers to interviews and television sets. You have to close these 300 or so pages to savor the full power of the excerpt, taken from Simone de Beauvoir’s novel, “A Death So Sweet”.

“The Fragile Age”, by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated by Laura Brignon, ed. Albin Michel, 272 p., €20.90, ebook €14.99.