the book of the week
NoonJanuary 14, 2023 – 6:29 pm
“Turning the page” by Ester Viola (Einaudi editions), a tasty sentimental treatise
Of Mirella Armiero
EMr. Viola has his own witty and recognizable voice on the Italian scene and manages to maintain an admirable balance between the suggestions of Nora Ephron and those of Elena Ferrante. After the novels that featured Olivia, a divorce lawyer transplanted from the south to Milan (like the author herself), an ironic little treatise on love now arrives in bookstores, «Turn the page” (Einaudi), in which the narrator is more openly autobiographical. The red thread of this «Sex and the City» of the new millennium is that of love suffering. Which, however, for Ester Viola, can be cured with infallible remedies: books.
For each category of sentimental pathology the writer finds a narrative antidote. Every woman has a double, a literary ghost, from Anna Karenina to Sally Rooney’s Marianne, who can show her the way forward. This is how the scattered pieces of a puzzle are made up, or rather the fragments of a love conversation that too often remains unanswered. Ester Viola moves within the «chick lit», but she crosses its borders with ease, going to dig into the pages of giants of writing, starting with Tolstoy. And in doing so, she sketches a contemporary fresco in which very often men and women appear disoriented and confused, despite their brazenness. Then there are the generational passages that leave their mark: «There is a moment of thirty years, at the beginning, when they seem to you only a (semi-eternal) extension of the twenty. Thirty-one, thirty-two. You fit really well, very comfortable, they still confuse you with a 25 year old. But you’re smarter than at 25, you hang out with people you like better, you have a salary. Time should stop there. 35 is a speck so far away. A little later you realize that the dot wasn’t far away, you turn 36 and you start to feel strange». The important thing is that hell doesn’t start.
January 14, 2023 | 6:29pm
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