Daria Bignardi on Donnaregina by Teresa Ciabatti: “The pain of the children is unbearable”

This entry is posted on number 17 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 22, 2025

Becoming parents means, among all other things, to sign a bill of pain and joy in white. There are no insurance or protections: it is much more risky than launching with paragliding and equally breathtaking, at certain times. In certain others, as for the protagonist of Donnaregina by Teresa Ciabatti (Mondadori), there is a risk of such a trauma that is done to remove it, avoid it, do not see it arrive. Interviewing a multi -homicide mafia boss, deciding to write a book on her story, for her it is less dangerous than going to speak with the professor who reports that her pre -adolescent girl seems sad, strange. The pain of the children for parents is unbearable. Better to ignore it at any cost, in order not to succumb, the writer of the novel seems to think while chasing the boss in his protected refuge or clumsily tries to investigate his family. So eccentric, for the Camorra codes, which also includes a gay son: Peppe Misso is the first in that environment to admit it. Before him in that world “the feminielli” made a bad end. We will discover that there is much more, in that criminal family, but never painful for the reader – obviously you identify with the writer than with the Camorra – as much as what is happening to her: a daughter who is suffering much more than she can bear.

Ciabatti’s language has always been unique. Unpredictable, sharp. His characters are inadequate, clumsy, sometimes mythomaniacs, unpleasant, always controversial, characters who do nothing to be loved by readers or their family members. Yet they are irresistible. In this novel Ciabatti says he tells what it means to age, definitively discover the pain: his anti -her turns fifty years and for the first time in life he has a very serious reason to complain, even if he tries to ignore him until that reason grabs it for the throat.

As always, when pain cars you, all that remains is to face it, but nothing (fortunately?) It will never be as before.

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Source: Vanity Fair

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