“My mother and father didn’t love me like they loved each other.”
How much suffering can be in a family? How can it be addressed? How deep and intense must be the cohesion of the family, or the experience of its individual members, in order to be able to respond blow by blow to the challenges that life presents?
The text talks about verbal and manipulative violence, which although they may seem very distant from our everyday life, in reality they are not. Affective dependencies that negatively affect entire lives, like an undiagnosed illness, of which the patient does not recognize the symptoms.
On the one hand we have the figure of Titian, a holy man who builds a religious sect around his mysterious figure. Spider’s web in which hundreds of people will be entangled, including the mother of Milena, our protagonist.
On the other side we have Emanuele, Milena’s boyfriend who will drag the girl to the depths of unawareness, to an emotional dependence that will deprive her of happiness as well as freedom.
The narrative core is very interesting: discovering that the leader of a cult and a toxic boyfriend use the same stratagems and the same dynamics to influence people. A warning to the many people who find themselves facing a similar situation without realizing it, other than the never-heeded advice of friends and relatives. This is why we indicate it as a reading path suitable for everyone.
The author, through Milena’s opaque life, apparently a monotonous and simple life of a university student, reveals the devious and always identical mechanisms that hide in her words. What is most surprising is the capacity for blackmail that they exercise within a relationship – which our protagonist is unable to recognize as toxic – and within a religious sect.
Alice Urciolo reflects on human weaknesses to reveal to us how fragile we can be without knowing it and without believing it; to reveal to us how difficult and petty and sometimes deceitful the relationship we have with ourselves can be.
What raises some doubts is the verbosity of the narration in some parts, perhaps it is just a matter of taste. In our opinion, it would have been more interesting to leave the reader with the ability to complete a dialogue, or arrive at certain conclusions, in short, to activate the right inferences.
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Alice Urciuolo, The truth that concerns us, 66thand2nd, Roma, 2023