In every woman there is the story of the origin, of the birth, of the first relationship with the mother, made of desire, mystery, blood. Mother in daughter (Feltrinelli), the first novel by Council De Gregorio, explores this ambiguity, crosses it without dissolving it, rather it hosts and does not judge negative feelings, anger, the sense of abandonment impotence, regret.
Three generations of women: Agata, Marilù, Angela, and a fourth that resists, that of Adele, called Adè, daughter of the last, grandson of a teenage mother, great -grandson of a witch who knew herbs and spells. The novel takes place during the summer, a suspended time from which you cannot escape and even hide. For the first time Adè and Marilù live together, because Angela cannot deal with it and asks for help from the mother, with whom she has also not talked for years and who ended up living “on an island of rocks, alone, in a house on top of a road where there is nothing more”. The girl and the old man find themselves together, separated from language and time but united by a family story of pain and ineptitudes, mothers who cannot say “I love you”, daughters who are shielding with science, escape, irony. The interlocking structure is very expressive, the voices alternate: Adè, which communicates almost only with its phone; Marilù, former gymnast, former actress, beauty of “jaguar”, survived her legend; Angela, who appears only for absences, letters, phone calls. Each voice has a peculiar pace, Adè is funny, tragic, compulsive. Marilù is sharp, disillusioned, sometimes lyrical. Angela is silence. There are no major events, no narrative turning point, there is instead a constant tension, as before the thunderstorms that broke the summers of our childhood.
The need to repair the broken transmission is the emotional engine of the novel, written on the border between the story and confession. De Gregorio works by subtraction, wanders among the fragments of a disintegrated family memory, brows the diary of a lost legacy, as if he had found a letter not sent, a bundle of old photos in a drawer, and puts his biography at stake, in particular the maternal line. The author said that, on the occasion of a disease, she dedicated a lot of time to reconstruct the complete names and events of its ancestors, discovering that the memory of the mothers often dissolve to the third generation.
In recent years, the theme of the mother, of the ancestors, of the transmission between women has become central both in consciousness and in the practice and writing of many – I peeled only two of those I have loved most, Dark mothers shining (Venexia) by Luciana Perovich e What I know of you (Guanda) of Nadia Terranova, who explores the mysteries and silences of family mythology. The mother, or the human par excellence, has become the symbolic place in which the new anxieties of the species are deposited, and the rhetoricals of power. On the one hand, the saving goddess, custodian of continuity, who ensures future without asking for anything, on the other the shadow, the manufacturer, guilty of refusing, interrupting, deserting. The mother is not only Maria dressed in blue veil, she is also Kali with her skull necklace. None of us knows how to be a mother without hurting. No daughter grows without having to defend himself from the mother. But, in the collapse of the order of the father, the maternal becomes a language of resistance, in spite of the men who fantastic both the appropriation and the cancellation, and of the clouded women, undecided between considering it sad biological destiny or great power.
De Gregorio escapes this field of forces, which appears indeed miserable in front of the power of bodies and life. He suggests that you can learn to give what you have not received, perhaps to a daughter, to a sister, even to herself. If this novel also has a political gesture, it is to refuse polarization and oblivion. Finding the voices of the women who preceded us – even those we have not loved, who have injured us – means restoring them a presence and strength. There is no sentimentalism but nostalgia, capable of dealing with cruelty and even fault for weaving an imperfect genealogy, missed looks, neglected intimacy and small legacy that survive in the body, language, in the way they cook or write and that offer at least one direction.