Barbara Frandino’s novel “You deserve that”. Review. – Culture


A man falls from the ladder he had leaned against a pomegranate tree in the garden. His wife abandons the unconscious man, maybe for half an hour. Only then does she call the ambulance. Because the man with whom she had lived for many years had betrayed her and had become a trusted stranger to her, perhaps even an enemy. But he’s still her husband.

In the hospital, therefore, not only does a long convalescence begin, which will never be completely successful, but also a confrontation between the woman and the husband, with the common habits of life, with his preferences and smells, with the smoking habits and the cats. Even the argument with the significant other will not lead to a happy ending. Too much has happened, which can no longer be made good, and if the narrator earns her living as a ghostwriter in matters of life support, then there is no punch line, but a deeper insight into the helplessness of the good advice.

The narrator leaves no doubt that she is out of control

This little book is more of a story of the end of a love. It’s a book about the fatality of closeness. His means is a dry, precise language or, which is almost the same, an accuracy of looking and formulating that does not allow any blurring or soft spots, no deceit against the other and certainly no deception in oneself: “The light fell on the mess on the sofa and the desk with a pile of knickknacks that suddenly seemed very tasteless to me. The white walls were too cold and the carpet was fading. Everything suddenly seemed different, but it was me who had changed. “

There are two sensations involved in jealousy: a feeling of being humiliated and an awareness of powerlessness. Both do not get along well with the mechanical irony with which jealousy is so often told. Barbara Frandino’s narrator, on the other hand, leaves no doubt that she has no control over herself: she recognizes what is happening, at least suspects why it is happening, but has no idea what to do, and so the disaster takes its course, both sides.

Barbara Frandino: You deserve that. Novel. Translated from the Italian by Karin Fleischanderl. Folio-Verlag, Vienna 2021. 165 pages, 22 euros.

Barbara Frandino understands something about the affects that drive people around, about the pathos that is attached to other people in their uniqueness because there are reasons enough to doubt the uniqueness of this person as well as the uniqueness of love. She also understands something of the sensuality that provides the basis and substance of pathos. She knows the doubt that, once grasped, dresses itself in a special, sometimes rough, but mostly fine cruelty and ultimately leaves little of the pomegranate tree.

And she knows how to tell about a typical life situation with typical means. The story that Barbara Frandino tells is simple, it is also ordinary. But it is written with a rare veracity, without vanity, without even attempting to rise above a situation one cannot rise above. This book is small and smart too.

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