THE LAKE'S WATER IS NEVER SWEET

Italy at the turn of the 21st century is a tough place to be poor and female.

In her English-language debut, Caminito paints a brutal portrait of working-class life reminiscent of Elsa Morante’s History and gives us a narrator as seething and self-damaging as Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. She creates a voice all her own, however, as the narrator (who gives her name only at the very end) chronicles her childhood and adolescence on the margins of Italian society while her redoubtable, impossible mother battles an indifferent bureaucracy to get permanent housing for a crippled husband and four children. Antonia Colombo embarrasses her daughter with loud confrontations with anyone who tries to keep the family at the bottom of the heap and maddens her with unceasing demands that she excel in school so she can have a better life than her mother. “I judge her and I do not forgive her,” declares the narrator. Painfully aware that she lacks the resources and confidence of other students, she reacts to all kindness with fear and rejection; since her mother has never expressed love, she doesn’t know how to either give or receive it. Antonia manages to move the family from Rome’s slums to public housing near a lake outside the city, but even here, they stand out as especially underprivileged, and the narrator is subjected to merciless teasing. When one particularly nasty boy cuts the strings on a tennis racket that her mother skipped paying bills to buy, she discovers a well of violence and rage that will serve both to protect her and isolate her as she grows to adulthood. Caminito’s gripping narrative takes many twists and turns but always remains focused on her compelling protagonist, so painfully vulnerable and unhappy that we understand even her most egregious acts. If only she could forgive herself for what life has made of her.

Ferocious and riveting.