The most beautiful book by Federica De Paolis cancels the distances between memoir and novel

Federica De Paolis puts her hands on the keyboard and writes her most beautiful book, which even has the declaration of being autofiction in the concluding note, but retains the stylistic features of pure fictional narration, so much so that the novel ends by saying: “The truth, in bottom, it doesn’t exist.” In Da parte di madre (Feltrinelli, 240 pp., 18 euros), in fact, the distance between memoir and novel collapses and the author takes us on the breathtaking journey of a woman seen through the eyes of her daughter: it is she who writes and rearranges the threads of facts, thoughts thought, intentions acted and those left on the tip of the tongue. “I felt that the unconscious was not an imaginary space, but a precise place sedimented in the soul: it was pressing to come out with its crystalline language”. De Paolis’s, on the other hand, rewrites synesthesia and in bundling together details, actions, peaks of emotional tension and real suspense, returns an infinity of places, metaphorical and at the same time purely physical: from the houses that the protagonists inhabit, and give the title to the chapters of the novel – moving back and forth in time between 1976 and 2001 – to the bodies that change, to those invisible knots that are the rosary of an endless love relationship: the one with the mother.

As beautiful as a Barbie, indeed with the exact features of that fashionable doll of the time, “she smoked a lot, drank hundreds of coffees heated in a sooty saucepan and always talked about him. She didn’t stay still for a moment, she chased a mysterious elsewhere in which she hoped to find peace, without success”: she was hungry for love and the void she tried to fill, even just by sitting next to an answering machine that recorded sighs and silences, was transformed into the syncopated dance of her daughter in an attempt to exist next to her. The men take turns – the Physicist, the Savage before her, and for her who writes the Giant or the Golden Boy -; women make themselves desired, they chase, they chase, they cry, they eat, they get fat, they lose weight, they drive like crazy; the city that gave birth to them wraps them in a warm womb and prevents them from falling apart; literature and novels (in the persons of Bianca Garufi who was Pavese’s companion and the psychoanalyst of the narrator, or Milan Kundera whose novels “enlightened the life” of “her young reader”, not to mention Moravia) they open gaps and sew edges between the real and the impossible; destiny looms, but, as in all of the writer’s works, it reaches the unexpected finish line.

It took Federica De Paolis almost twenty years to transfigure life into literature, to command the gesture of writing that is so natural to her elsewhere, even here, in a story where the boundaries between actions, fictions and emotions are lost: “Love, for goodness’ sake, cry, otherwise the next time you cry twice as much”. We cry, yes. And we remain admired by that sky that De Paolis opens up for us. A “sky sizzling with stars”.

Federica De Paolis puts her hands on the keyboard and writes her most beautiful book, which even has the declaration of being autofiction in the concluding note, but retains the stylistic features of pure fictional narration, so much so that the novel ends by saying: “The truth, in bottom, it doesn’t exist.” In Da parte di madre (Feltrinelli, 240 pp., 18 euros), in fact, the distance between memoir and novel collapses and the author takes us on the breathtaking journey of a woman seen through the eyes of her daughter: it is she who writes and rearranges the threads of facts, thoughts thought, intentions acted and those left on the tip of the tongue. “I felt that the unconscious was not an imaginary space, but a precise place sedimented in the soul: it was pressing to come out with its crystalline language”. De Paolis’s, on the other hand, rewrites synesthesia and in bundling together details, actions, peaks of emotional tension and real suspense, returns an infinity of places, metaphorical and at the same time purely physical: from the houses that the protagonists inhabit, and give the title to the chapters of the novel – moving back and forth in time between 1976 and 2001 – to the bodies that change, to those invisible knots that are the rosary of an endless love relationship: the one with the mother.

As beautiful as a Barbie, indeed with the exact features of that fashionable doll of the time, “she smoked a lot, drank hundreds of coffees heated in a sooty saucepan and always talked about him. She didn’t stay still for a moment, she chased a mysterious elsewhere in which she hoped to find peace, without success”: she was hungry for love and the void she tried to fill, even just by sitting next to an answering machine that recorded sighs and silences, was transformed into the syncopated dance of her daughter in an attempt to exist next to her. The men take turns – the Physicist, the Savage before her, and for her who writes the Giant or the Golden Boy -; women make themselves desired, they chase, they chase, they cry, they eat, they get fat, they lose weight, they drive like crazy; the city that gave birth to them wraps them in a warm womb and prevents them from falling apart; literature and novels (in the persons of Bianca Garufi who was Pavese’s companion and the psychoanalyst of the narrator, or Milan Kundera whose novels “enlightened the life” of “her young reader”, not to mention Moravia) they open gaps and sew edges between the real and the impossible; destiny looms, but, as in all of the writer’s works, it reaches the unexpected finish line.

It took Federica De Paolis almost twenty years to transfigure life into literature, to command the gesture of writing that is so natural to her elsewhere, even here, in a story where the boundaries between actions, fictions and emotions are lost: “Love, for goodness’ sake, cry, otherwise the next time you cry twice as much”. We cry, yes. And we remain admired by that sky that De Paolis opens up for us. A “sky sizzling with stars”.