As a holiday destination, the green, wide Italian valleys are wonderful, but living in such a place is less idyllic, Ginevra Lamberti shows in her novel Everyone sleeps in the valley.
'The valley is not a place but a time that will not end, life here is not a time but a place whose exit cannot be found.' That not too positive thought creeps over the young Italian woman Gaia, who lives in 'the yellow house' in a quiet valley in the Veneto region. It is the place where her ancestors also grew up and lived, and to which everyone always returned.
So does Gaia, who tried unsuccessfully in Rome to succeed in life - education, work, relationships - and then returns to the valley, to the yellow house where her grandmother and parents still live. That feels like failure. 'Now that she is back here, the wind whispers to her every night that she has lost.'
Originally
Everyone sleeps in the valley is Ginevra Lamberti's third novel and the first to be translated into Dutch. With her previous two books, she immediately established her name as a new literary talent; her previous, Perché comincio alle fine, was awarded the Premio Mondello for the originality of the story and the original narrative style.
Lamberti moulded autobiographical elements into fiction for this new novel: like Gaia, she was born in Europe's largest rehab centre, San Patrignano, and grew up in the valley described. This lifelikeness is palpable and makes the painted landscape and characters authentic, even if they do not immediately evoke warm feelings.
Three generations
Against the backdrop of changing Italy, Ginevra Lamberti outlines in Everyone sleeps in the valley the lives of three generations of women: Augusta, her daughter Costanza and Costanza's daughter Gaia. Augusta is just a girl when she is sent out of work. Her brothers are allowed to continue studying, but in the years before World War II, this is out of the question for girls in large, poorer families.
Growing up in the yellow house in the secluded valley, where the beginning and end of the day is "decapitated" by the mountains, she suffers a culture shock when she is sent to Milan to look after the three-year-old daughter of a wealthy widower, who has started a different life. She is paid less per month to care for the little girl than the beautiful doll she finds in the window of a toy shop costs. Augusta folds to the expectations of the outside world and puts away her own desires and feelings. This makes her a surly, cold-hearted woman as an adult.
When Augusta, after returning to her parents' home, is reluctant to start a life of her own, her parents promise to marry her to the twenty-year-old widower Tiziano. Against all odds, daughter Constanza is born: Tiziano actually wanted a son, Augusta just a doll. She regards carnal duty and its result as a curse.
1970s
Costanza grows up rather lonely in a loveless family. But the lack of emotional involvement also has its advantages: it allows her to escape to the city with her friend Livia as often as possible. Because where time seems to stand still in the valley, in the rest of the world, the 1970s have arrived with its hippies and drugs.
Both Livia and Costanza seek salvation in a relationship, but are disappointed. Livia becomes a young mother, but is later left alone. Costanza gets into a relationship with Claudio, who is severely addicted to heroin. Yet she does not bid him farewell; indeed, she follows him to a new, commune-style rehab centre, where addicts have the chance to get their lives back on track, but must submit to strict rules.
So it may happen that Costanza gets the clinic boss to let her little daughter Gaia go back to Augusta and the yellow house in the valley, while Claudio and herself have to stay at the clinic.
When they are finally allowed to leave, a tumultuous time dawns in which Costanza is depressed, Claudio becomes increasingly paranoid and the 'family' keeps moving, eventually returning to the whole house in the valley. Which seems even emptier and more desolate than ever, since modernity has taken the form of a highway in the distance.
Ancestry
To what extent is a person defined by his ancestors and the environment in which he lives? These questions are at the heart of Everyone sleeps in the valley. The fragmented way Lamberti introduces her main characters and describes events, constantly staggered in time, requires concentration from the reader.
But that narrative method also cleverly reflects the fragmented, not very enviable lives of the characters, which consist mainly of caring for others. Gaia's sigh that "blood ties should actually be outlawed by law" is therefore not out of the blue.
Fortunately, there is a glimmer of hope at the end of this beautifully told but not very cheerful novel.
Translated by Manon Smits.
Van Oorschot, € 25
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