“Childhood friendships have the consistency of stream water.“
How do personal relationships arise between people? What does it depend on and how does that exact moment come about when a simple acquaintance becomes sincere friendship? Starting from these themes, the writer analyzes the relationships of a friendly nature between women over the years. A narrative engine that works more and more as the pages go by and that the author handles with extreme skill.
Hence the structure of the text in stories, each with different protagonists, distant in space and time, but united by a deep feeling of friendship towards some people, accomplices in challenges and transgressions. The difference between friendships born when you are young and inexperienced in the world, in which you perhaps try to emulate a certain person, to those born in adulthood, when instead you have a greater awareness of yourself and of the people you want to bring into the own daily life.
Between past and present, reality and fantasy, the text collects the stories of well-known names in world culture from Antonia Pozzi, to Frida Kahlo, to Lalla Romano, to Virginia Woolf, interspersed with those of the author’s real friends. A continuous emotional parallel in which many readers could find themselves, and many readers could find something to learn from.
Why do we say this? We believe that although the feeling of friendship is pure without gender differences, when it arrives in its highest form of sisterhood (or brotherhood), the specific weight of the confidences made, the truths kept silent or shouted in the face, are different if we speak of women or men.
The writing, linear and devoid of stylistic exercises for their own sake, was much appreciated. A cleaning of the text of other times, in which the superfluous is cleaned away before you can see it. A quality often absent in many contemporary texts, in which instead of drying out a text one tends to add pages upon pages of nothing.
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Gaia Manzini, La via delle sorelle, Bompiani, Milano, 2023