“I don’t want to love him so as not to lose him.”
Viola is a young journalist who, for work reasons, decides to move from Naples to Milan to work in the editorial office of a large newspaper. As often happens, however, dreams clash with harsh reality, and Viola finds herself chasing low-paid and temporary jobs.
In parallel with her life, that of Ershela, the other protagonist of the book, runs wild; a young Albanian girl who, chasing what she thought was the love of her life, arrives in Italy to move through various stages from Otranto to Turin to Rome to Rimini. A journey along the length of the boot in which she finds herself a sex slave and forced to see her dignity as a woman erased.
The two girls are united not only by their being (each in her own way) foreigners in a foreign land, but also by the relationship they have with the sisters left at home. Viola has a sister with whom her family always compares her, but with whom she somehow manages to communicate, while Ershela has a sister with whom she cannot get in touch to protect her, and who will represent her only source of concern (in a maternal sense), throughout the story.
Two distant life paths, which will meet by pure chance, when Viola decides to give shape to an investigation on street women, and interviews Ershela, in a short period of her life in which she leads an almost normal existence inside a family home.
The greatest merit of the book is that of bringing a true story to the collective memory, because Ershela really existed, and her letters (in the text there is a long section of unsent epistles), although revised in form, are the original ones of the protagonist.
Although certainly well written, the style adopted does not fall within the spectrum of our literary preferences. We would have preferred a more incisive writing in some passages, capable of making the reader feel the cold of the street, the sliminess on the skin that was transferred from the customers to our protagonist, the opacity of Italian society (and this at all levels), but perhaps these are personal preferences, which other readers may consider unnecessary.
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Lucia Esposito, Sorelle spaiate, Giunti, Firenze, 2024