RISPONDIMI

Three novellas set in the author’s native Italy and connected by spiritual/religious themes of good and evil, love and redemption.

In the title story, Tamaro (Follow Your Heart, 1995, etc.) recounts a young girl’s downward slide after her mother’s death when the girl is eight. In her boarding school, she’s considered an orphan by the nuns until, several years later, a great-uncle and his wife become her guardians and she’s sent to visit them on her vacations. Unfortunately, unlike the kindly nuns, these relatives are cold and mercenary, their religion harsh. After various cruelties, the now-17-year-old drops out of school and works as a nanny for a teacher who treats her with real kindness and generosity. But the teacher’s husband takes advantage of her, then, to save face, accuses her of theft when she becomes pregnant. Having chosen to bear the child despite her unhappy past, she sits in the sun pondering good and evil. “Hell Does Not Exist” concerns a middle-aged woman whose recently deceased husband, a wealthy and educated man, showed a benevolent face to the world but was a viciously cruel husband and father. He despised his son Michelle for his sensitivity and his religious devotion; the story includes a long, almost unreadable letter from the saintly boy. After a violent argument, the man storms out of the house and, careening down the driveway in his car, accidentally strikes Michelle, killing him instantly. The woman can forgive neither him nor herself for her own weakness is staying married to such a man. The husband and father who narrates “The Burning Forest” killed his wife years earlier in an act of madness brought on by too much love when her growing independence (and religiosity) drove him toward a state of delusional paranoia. Redemption comes when his estranged daughter finally answers one of his letters.

Holy abstractions brightened by dollops of sex and violence.