The Brittle Age, winner of the 2024 Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award, is Donatella Di Pietrantonio's third work published in English and assuredly translated by Ann Goldstein. Once more, Di Pietrantonio (A Girl Returned; A Sister's Story), explores profound relationships between women, complicated by the consequences of neglect and abuse.
The Covid-19 pandemic has sent Amanda home from university, unsettling her mother, Lucia, a recently separated physiotherapist: "I didn't understand her, I didn't understand what she wanted from me. I was afraid of being alone with her." Amanda isolates herself in her room, barely emerging even to eat. What looms between them is an attack Amanda survived--alone. Violence for Lucia is not unfamiliar. Nearly 30 years ago, when Lucia was 20, a man assaulted three girls on her family's campground, leaving two dead; the one who lived was Lucia's close childhood friend. What continues to haunt Lucia is all that she did and didn't do in response to what happened to two of the most important women in her life.
Di Pietrantonio intensely examines that gateway between waning childhood and waxing adulthood, splicing and overlapping Lucia's experiences as youthful friend and maturing mother. She writes without elaborations, often moving between events without immediate connection: Lucia pulling Amanda out of bed to bathe, a phone call with her estranged husband, his sweaters she still airs out in search of moths, her father's anger over the still-unfiled divorce. The hops and jumps require careful parsing--names, memories, happenings to be intuited by context rather than explication--but empathic engagement yields gratifying rewards. --Terry Hong