It’s a bit like those comfortable armchairs that you sink into with a quiet sigh and don’t get up again for the next two to three hours. Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s new novel has a comparable effect despite its dramatic subject matter – it’s about a crime that actually happened. From the first line, you surrender to the insinuating rhythm, fall into the pull of events, follow the tricky mother-daughter dynamic, learn about enthusiastic friendships, the patriarchal conditions in Abruzzo, the wild mountain world and the customs of the shepherds .

:The principle of the series
Donatella Di Pietrantonio continues her story about two sisters caught between tradition and social advancement. She doesn’t seem entirely sure about herself. And be warned about the German blurb.
Is there a great narrator at work or is it a manipulative arranger? A little bit of both. The milieu, ambience and basic conflicts are familiar to Di Pietrantonio readers from the previous novels, and it’s like coming home. But the writer, born in Abruzzo in 1962, a pediatric dentist and a successful author since 2017, begins to rely far too much on her skills and is also under pressure to harmonize. There is hardly any room for surprises or friction, dissonances are resolved, which can easily take on a melodramatic side.
This doesn’t seem to bother the literary world: “The Fragile Time” has just been awarded the most important Italian literary prize, the Premio Strega.
Did she abandon her friend and will the same thing happen to her daughter?
Who are we dealing with in this novel? A middle-aged first-person narrator takes the floor and adopts a measured tone that Maja Pflug masterfully recreates in German. Your life seems well-ordered, with no upward or downward amplitudes. She is a physiotherapist by profession, a choir singer, and her long-term marriage to her husband ended without a dramatic separation. She seems to avoid stronger feelings; Only music awakens emotions. And her daughter Amanda, who has just grown up, is helpless in the face of her.
After a promising start at a prestigious Milan university, Amanda returned home at the beginning of the pandemic, sleeping through the days and seeming to be gripped by an unfathomable sadness that has more to do with the heroine than she wants to admit. At the same time, the narrator’s father, an imperious farmer, entangles her in inheritance matters and deeds her a forest on top of the Dente del Lupo, the Wolf’s Tooth, as the mountain is called. An investor has his eye on the property and is planning a luxury resort. There are still the weathered remains of a campsite that a friend of the father ran. His wife’s cooking skills made the place a popular excursion destination thirty years earlier; his daughter Doralice handled the rush of guests, supported by her best friend, the narrator. The two of them infect two sisters of the same age from northern Italy with their thirst for adventure. One morning Doralice sets off on a hike with them.
Di Pietrantonio effectively twists plot threads, interlinks time levels and undermines the well-tempered nature of her protagonist. Basically, she is experiencing a repetition: the fact that Amanda left Milan in such a hurry is due to a night-time attack that ended lightly but left her completely disturbed. Although the mother found out about it immediately and suspected that her daughter needed her, she is paralyzed. And this numbness has dominated her since that long-ago summer with Doralice, because back then she abandoned her friend.
Doralice climbed the Dente del Lupo with the northern Italian women, got lost and crossed the route of a shepherd who committed a double murder on the sisters. Doralice managed to escape the man, but wandered through the forest for days in fear of death. Consumed by feelings of guilt, the first-person narrator no longer found access to her friend, who soon afterwards Left Italy. The crime that Di Pietrantonio stages as the black heart of her novel now also determines the lives of those left behind. For the heroine, archaic nature, her awakening sexuality and male violence seem to mix together. She will never tell her daughter about the murder and will also keep her away from the mountains. The realization of the novel “The Fragile Time” is that the secession did not help anything, but on the contrary developed even greater power.
Di Pietrantonio has her best moments when she leaves things vague and doesn’t immediately break down the discomfort of her main characters. The formula “archaism equals violence” is all too worn out; Furthermore, as in “Arminuta” and “Borgo Sud”, the author likes to negotiate the social gap between town and country in pairs, which results in a tiring symmetry. In the previous novels she was embodied by pairs of sisters and mother-daughter pairs, this time by a pair of friends and again by a mother-daughter team.
The Italian one mom Taking it off its pedestal and making it more ambivalent is a merit in itself, but giving it the attribute of emotional coldness every time creates monotony. Donatella Di Pietrantonio knows her narrative craft, but she brings her novel to an end like a patience player whose game finally works. Pacification, reconciliation, that’s what it has to all boil down to for her, and it’s precisely in these moments that melodrama finally threatens, and she also freezes in linguistic cliché.
Right at the beginning it is said about the experience of singing together: “I, too, enter the mystery.” When the villagers finally clear the ruins of the campsite and hold a concert on the mountain, to which Doralice and her parents also come, they suddenly appear the ghosts of the murdered girls from the forest, nature absorbs everything like a mother’s womb: “The choir (…) breaks the silence of years. The last shooting star of the summer burns out in the sky above the Dente del Lupo.” Mamma mia.
Donatella Di Pietrantonio, The Fragile Time. Translated from Italian by Maja Pflug. Kunstmann Verlag Munich 2024. 240 pages, 22 euros.