At Gabriella Zalapì, a fugue in major mode – Libération

In “Ilaria or the Conquest of Disobedience”, a father abandoned by his mother takes his 8-year-old daughter for a long wandering across Italy.

The first word that comes to mind when we think of Gabriella Zalapì’s writing is delicacy. But a violent delicacy if we can dare this oxymoron. This author of English, Swiss and Italian origins has the talent to take us on personal and universal stories where the sweetness and brutality of childhood are intertwined, the difficulty of girls and women to find their place in a world where men impose themselves and spread out, all with words that slide and resonate with the same clarity, the same grace as the song of a river flowing between the stones in the heart of the mountain.

It is her story and that of her ancestors that Gabriella Zalapì dissects endlessly and we never tire of it. She manages to surprise us each time by putting the spotlight on an episode from the past. Ilaria is her, at 8 years old, abducted by her father whom her mother left and who was driven mad by rage. One day in May 1980, he comes to pick her up from school and takes her away in his navy blue BMW, model 320 coupé, for a long wandering across Italy. It is written in the first person singular, at the height of a child, a child who perceives the trouble, the anger, the solitude, the suffering, the incomprehension but who struggles to put all these feelings end to end, the life