Reviewed by Catherine Parnell
The Brittle Age
by Donatella Di Pietrantonio
translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Europa
June 3, 2025, $18.00, 192 pages, ISBN: 9798889660873
If you fancy literature in translation, then Europa’s catalog represents wonders, and in this year of the Italian Jubilee – as we leave Covid in the rearview mirror and drive the road of DOGE devastation – it’s an act of salvation to turn away from the spectacle of political chaos and dive into the emotional truths found in Europa’s publications. Take, for example, the Italian village wounded by a brutal crime in the 1990s that rises from the pages of 2024 Strega Prize winner, the novel The Brittle Age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, beautifully translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. Moving from present to past with slim reflective passages, the novel examines more than individual responses to violence; it investigates cultural dissonance and our innate need to place blame on ourselves or the other, whoever that may be, and sometimes it’s us in an earlier life. A powerful examination of memory, resilience, reckoning, and acceptance, Di Pietrantonio’s novel marries fact with fiction to create a novel driven by secrets that must be relinquished and failings that must be acknowledged. It’s about honesty and truth.
Caught between the fragile ages of her father and her daughter, and a crumbled marriage, physiotherapist Lucia walks a thin line navigating life in the Apennine mountains in Italy. Her daughter, Amanda, abandons college in Milan, lives with Lucia in Pescara, and isolates in her room, emerging only to eat, if that. Lucia‘s father, mourning his wife, is intent on deeding a derelict venture on family land – a once-thriving campground favored by backpackers – to his daughter. And therein lies the rub: the campground represents the double murder and rape of two young women. A third, Lucia’s best friend Doralice, escaped, but the friendship between the two young women broke and remains in tatters.
That may sound like a neat summary of a book encapsulating Covid times, but in the expert hand of Donatella Di Pietrantonio, the novel tosses complex family and friend dynamics into a vortex of guilt, love, and responsibility. Lucia suffers the rift in her relationship with her daughter:
Respecting her freedom, I failed her when she needed me. Some boundaries are too subtle for an indecisive mother like me. But do most parents know at every moment the truth of what to do?
And of her father, Lucia admits:
It’s been difficult to fight him and I’m not finished yet. I couldn’t always defy him, and over time my father has also been right about my life.
And Doralice, Lucia’s childhood friend, the one who survived the attack, represents youthful transgression in the face of horror. Lucia considers visiting her friend in the hospital, but “…I didn’t feel ready. I was a coward, but I, too, had to recover.” Between complicity, independence and allowing for agency and autonomy lies that dark hole, and Lucia flounders in it. The impact of the past threatens not just Lucia, but her family, friends, and the entire community, and the strength to heal arises from a most unlikely place.
The book’s structure functions as a roadmap: there are titled parts or sections (“Amanda,” “The Girls,” “Dente del Lupo,” “The Flight,” and “The Concert”) containing numbered short or flash-like chapters, with compressed sentences that expose emotional missteps and wounds. The tension builds from the first sentence in the book, “The mess I find in the morning reminds me that I’m not alone anymore.” Lucia, changed by repressed experience, shares space with her daughter and the past that’s erupting. If there is such a thing as novelistic adaptation of unspoken anaphora (or epistrophe, for that matter), it might be a sentence about strength and truth, or as Lucia says, “I have to restore the world to my daughter.”
But of that restoration, she also says, “It’s breaking me.” If Di Pietrantonio has anything to say to us in The Brittle Age, it’s that just because something is broken doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. And if it can’t be fixed, what counts is the truth bolstering the effort.
About the reviewer: Catherine Parnell is a writer, editor, educator, and the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. She is co-founder of MicroLit and serves on the board of Wrath-Bearing Tree. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, and reviews and interviews in Five on the Fifth, LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Mud Season Review, Emerge, Orca, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines.