Sequels are one of those things. Can you build on the intensity of a first book, with the same staff and a similar milieu, only in a slightly different time with aged heroes? There are examples where this narrative principle works. Karl Ove Knausgård with his meandering autobiographical self-parsing across the Norwegian present is a prominent case, as is the Englishwoman Jane Gardam, who later became famous, with her trilogy about the lawyer in Hong Kong, “Old Filth”. Virginie Despentes is one of them, with her three-part series about the Parisian record seller Subutex, who focused on brutal gentrification and neoliberal France. And of course Elena Ferrante and her tetralogy of Naples, a psychogram of friendship and a portrait of a country in which the principle of the series was deliberately exhausted in a dramaturgical way.
It may be that the Italian writer Donatella Di Pietrantonio, a dentist by profession and who became famous in 2017 with the novel “Arminuta”, had exactly this multi-part in mind when she started a second volume. Born in Abruzzo in 1962, she was not a debutante, but had already published two narrow books on her home region. “Arminuta” then became the best-selling book of the year and was also a success abroad.
To build on that must have seemed seductive, especially since she had negotiated a very unusual subject. The bestseller was about a sheltered middle-class girl who suddenly found herself on the threshold of puberty in her rural family of origin. “Arminuta”, which means “the returned one” in the dialect, had been given as an infant to a childless, wealthy cousin of whom she knew nothing. Now she has to cope with the loss of her social mother as well as the fact that she has been abandoned by her own mother. She remains a foreign body in her family, only gaining access to her younger sister Adriana. Finally she manages to escape the village again by attending grammar school. The sister will take her with her right away.
In the end, her educational status gives the narrator a way out
Di Pietrantonio takes up this thread in her new novel “Borgo Sud”. In the mid-1980s, the first-person narrator, a promising doctoral student in literary studies, is about to marry a dentist from one of the best families in the small town by the sea, behind which Pescara can easily be recognized. It was because of the nameless young woman and her tenacious persistence that her fiancé Piero even graduated. Full of luck with their solid daughter-in-law, the parents give the couple a condominium as a present.
The fact that her origins stuck to her like bad luck is already evident in the first scene: At an exam party for Piero, a hailstorm rises over the board in the middle of summer, and the heroine injures herself on a piece of guttering. Her sister Adriana, the second main character in the novel, immediately interprets the accident as a sign. Arrested in an archaic world, in a relationship with a fisherman and, unlike the narrator, not in a position to cope with social advancement, Adriana looks for shelter with her three years later, and not alone: in her early twenties she faces the with a baby Door.
She looks like a driven woman. As it turns out after a while, her husband Rafael has high debts, and his creditors are now threatening Adriana as well. The dissimilar sisters are closely connected and, unlike the older one, Adriana has retained her intuition. She senses that something is wrong with Piero. Even if her educational status gave the narrator a way out in the end, both young women have to cope with deep ruptures, which seems to have something to do with their unsteady mother: either she devours the daughters through excessive closeness or she lets them down. Nothing changes until her death, and Adriana cannot forgive her for the rejection she has suffered even afterwards.
Donatella Di Pietrantonio: Borgo Sud. Novel. Translated from the Italian by Maja Pflug. Kunstmann, Munich 2021, 224 pages, 20 euros.
Similar to “Arminuta” there is again a tangle of confused family relationships and ambivalent ties, mixed with the inability to break free from them. Perhaps to give this lava of feeling a structuring framework, Donatella Di Pietrantonio adds a second level of time: The first-person narrator has long been a professor in Grenoble, France, and separated from her husband when she received a call in the middle of class via the secretariat that said something seems to have something to do with an accident. She embarks on a train journey from France to Abruzzo, has a sleepless night in a hotel in the city where she was once married, and finally goes to the hospital. Who it’s all about only becomes apparent in the middle of “Borgo Sud”, and then the plot gains momentum.
The first part of the novel is not coherent either formally or in terms of content. The links between the memories of the first years of marriage, childhood images, postponed explanations of the family relationships and set pieces from the more recent past in France are fraying, and even strong moments seem strangely thwarted, as if the writer, unlike in “Arminuta”, did not trusts in their material. Di Pietrantonio’s first-person narrator finds no attitude towards the events, but vacillates between her roles as a direct participant and a reflective observer. This is particularly evident in a central scene when the mother beats Adriana and pronounces a curse after the birth of the illegitimate grandson. “I looked at them with an inextricable mixture of pity and horror,” they say, instead of conveying this mood through narrative. In this way, the author of the gesture takes its weight off. And the fact that the first-person narrator even speaks of “superstition” and “magical thinking” a few sentences further dilutes the whole thing. In “Arminuta” Di Pietrantonio had convinced through the portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship. The abysmal is less noticeable in “Borgo Sud”, and the pair of sisters is not nearly as captivating either.
Solidarity also reproduces the power relationships that women are exposed to
After all, the marriage story takes an unexpected turn. You should be careful not to read the blurb: For inexplicable reasons, all the tension-inducing elements are anticipated there. The descriptions of the poor part of town where the fishermen live and where Adriana lives are also successful. Regardless of the rapid industrialization, there is another idea of common good in Borgo Sud. However, these solidarity practices also reproduce the traditional power relations to which women are defenseless.
This is another reason why Donatella Di Pietrantonio is so successful in Italy: Just like Elena Ferrante, she names the emotional costs that her generation had to pay for educational advancement. The alienation from one’s own family can no longer be caught. Let’s see if Di Pietrantonio tells of the fate of her heroine’s nephew in a third volume. It remains to be seen how it will be ready for series production.