THE SCENT OF YOUR BREATH

A second self-assured sexual coming-of-age tale by the young Sicilian author of 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (2004).

The opening of this hallucinatory novel in episodes describes a buzzing bee entangled in the hair of the first-person narrator, as if trying to impart to her some kind of message she can’t understand. This scene establishes the story’s impressionist, somewhat arbitrary feel. The narrator is scarcely 19, and already fairly well known as an author in Rome, where she lives with her lover, Thomas, for whom she has left her boyfriend Claudio back home in Catania, Sicily. Thomas brings out her maternal side, and she begins to feel terrible homesickness for her mother and Catania. Childhood memories of growing up there with her mother, father and extended family compound the growing insecurity the narrator feels in her relationship with Thomas. She expresses the need to return to her “roots,” yet recognizes that this is not possible. She often addresses her mother as “You,” a kind of guardian: “You watch and protect it as I have not asked you to, as I do not expect you to.” After a traumatic miscarriage, she begins to question Thomas’s fidelity, and drives a wedge between them by cross-examining him with obsessive jealousy. Voices whisper to her—her mother’s voice, as well as strange women who goad her to write and to spy on Thomas. Her mother used to warn her about dragonflies, which, she said, were actually women who visit at night and cast spells, and in her increasingly delusional state, the narrator imagines these so-called night-women are pursuing her. In the end, the story is saved from descending into a confusing disjointedness by the narrator’s youthful, candid voice.

An experimental work that relentlessly tests states of reality versus fantasy.