Rome, jackets with shoulder pads, peach pink and pastille earrings, landline phones, paper magazines, the Eighties look to the future but the ghosts of the twentieth century also hover among the flashes of the Craxian dawn of 1983. The most tenacious ghost insinuates itself into a small paradise on earth which Ilaria Gaspari, in her novel The Reputation (Guanda), reconstructs with a clinical gaze and softness of line, making the reader emerge among the velvet poufs and mirrors of a dressing room Parioli boutique, Joséphine, reign of Marie-France, one of those French women who see the relationship with reality as a continuous embellishment. “It was perhaps a weakness of hers or the sign of her dedication to research that had led her to build, piece by piece, like a work of art, her own person as a Junoesque and shining blonde, identical to herself over the years and in the seasons, to suggest a perennial maturity without sunrises or sunsets”.
Rome, jackets with shoulder pads, peach pink and pastille earrings, landline phones, paper magazines, the Eighties look to the future but the ghosts of the twentieth century also hover among the flashes of the Craxian dawn of 1983. The most tenacious ghost insinuates itself into a small paradise on earth which Ilaria Gaspari, in her novel The Reputation (Guanda), reconstructs with a clinical gaze and softness of line, making the reader emerge among the velvet poufs and mirrors of a dressing room Parioli boutique, Joséphine, reign of Marie-France, one of those French women who see the relationship with reality as a continuous embellishment. “It was perhaps a weakness of hers or the sign of her dedication to research that had led her to build, piece by piece, like a work of art, her own person as a Junoesque and shining blonde, identical to herself over the years and in the seasons, to suggest a perennial maturity without sunrises or sunsets”.
A woman who is herself the artist, the work and the restorer, Marie-France, and to whom the young narrator approaches in one of those middle seasons of life in which one is young but no longer a girl, in balanced between different interests and loves, a symptom of an identity to which this middle-aged Pygmalion gives a peremptory and highly commercially successful response: beauty, the camouflage of everything, of suffering and pain, primary causes of every collapse. “It happened that some very acute pain that required dullness as an antidote, or an excess of sleepless nights, barbiturates and lithium, cigarettes, anguish and chocolates, fortified wines and dry spirits, ended up scribbling on those bodies smoothed by nothingness a second deformed body, an unhappy metamorphosis of the first”, writes Gaspari. The life around this factory of elegance is recalled with sinuous phrases that leave nothing of the enchantment of those years behind, between parties and ideas of grandeur, the glittering tail of a sweet life that would soon be completely extinguished. “Rome was fun, it was so alive!”, and against this background extravagant and realistic characters move, people we seem to have met or who – power of the Eternal City – we could still meet if we paid more attention, slightly theatrical creatures of an ambitious, hedonistic society, determined to improve itself and show itself in its best light, but perhaps not to progress.
And in fact little by little something is cracking, the city is not entirely ready for a future, and when Marie-France decides to open the shop to little girls, freeing them from the clothes chosen by their mothers, severe and often cruel fairies, to offer something made especially for them, an angelic balance is broken: the monstrous enters. The Milanese Gaspari uses, without explicit references, a real background, that is, the moment in which Mirella Gregori and Emanuela Orlandi were still two little girls who disappeared in the panic of a city, before they acquired the translucency of faded photos and crystallized in cold cases of everlasting charm. And this supports the story of the dizzying crescendo of episodes that cause Joséphine to lose her aura and fall from an adolescent fantasy and a mentality always welcoming towards slander. Like half a century earlier other shops, other thriving realities had been shattered by the most poisonous rumor of all, the anti-Jewish prejudice that devastated the twentieth century and which here crosses Gaspari’s pages like a viper ready to bite. Reputation is a novel of plot and atmosphere, a noir of history constructed with the precision of the metallic and shining mechanism of a music box in which the perfection of the sound – the fashion, the prestige, the beauty with its fatuous dance – makes it sinister the progress of the rust of eternal prejudices and newly minted rumors. What is fashion? “A ritual, a jargon, a dream, a secret that could only be revealed to eyes as understanding as hers”, according to the narrator, who never tires of observing Marie-France, the true center of the novel. A woman to whom “every interpretation of the act of dressing appeared potentially interesting to her, as to a true studiosa”. Ilaria Gaspari’s writing finds in long sentences and lexical richness the recipe for its simplicity to describe the “chiffon years”, that late flowering of a carefreeness condemned by the return of a stubborn fashion, the only one that does not pass: prejudice.
