The Violin
Dacia Maraini, translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood Arcadia Books, 197pp, £10.99
ISBN 1900850435
Dacia Maraini is one of Italy's best-known writers, famed for her radicalism of both form and content. Her novels are different and original, fired by compassion for human suffering, and often combine autobiography with experiment to produce new fictional shapes. What a disappointment, therefore, that she appears to have written a new book in such haste.
The Violin purports to be a series of letters from a middle-aged Italian writer, Vera, to a child called Flavia. Vera fondly recalls their meetings on holiday, the sympathy and warmth that quickly sprang up between them, creating a friendship that surprised the other adults and made Flavia's mother, Marta, more than a little jealous. Over the course of the book - 1988 to 1995 - the small girl grows up, but she remains, for the wistful Vera, a sentimental icon of childhood, in her red beret and red shoes.
Flavia, it turns out, functions indeed as a kitsch holiday souvenir to remind Vera of a lost love, a lost holiday resort, a lost paradise. Flavia's uncle Edoardo has been Vera's lover, and the letters to Flavia seem merely excuses for Vera to ruminate on the pain of their parting. The content of the letters varies, roving from subject to subject very much in the manner of free association, but the letters do not convince us that they are written over an expanse of time. Their short narrative, of possession followed by loss, is spread throughout the sequence, making it seem an entire text written in one gulp. Their only literary function is to express the compulsive-obsessive nature of Vera's thoughts circling around her lost young lover.
En route, we are given vignettes of life in the holiday hotel and Vera's reflections on mushroom picking, intensive farming, ageing, the writing process and music. We attend concerts with Vera and Flavia, hear Edoardo play. Whimsical passages, clearly aimed at a child, include musings on mice, elves and farts.
The format Maraini has chosen for these musings unfortunately allows her to indulge in a naivety that is both unappealing and insincere. At first the writing seems simply charming, wishing to please, summoning a vision of Flavia "like a furious angel with a cherry-red beret . . . You were wearing a tartan skirt that skipped over your knees and tomato-red shoes with little ballerina bows."
Quite soon, Vera is educating Flavia on the evil done to calves herded towards the abattoir: "Many die and no one gives a damn, just as it was with the victims of the Nazis." Immediately Vera adds piously: "But I don't want to make you sad, Flavia." She goes on to make bitchy hints about Flavia's mother and to instruct the child on ways that women use physical symptoms to mime emotional distress. Vera cannot quite admit her competitiveness with Marta. How much more interesting if she had.
Vera is intent, one suspects, on creating an ideal self-portrait from which any nasty feelings are airbrushed away: "A Madonna suffused with heavenly light and happy to be herself could not have seemed more sacred and more perfect in my eyes than my sister Akiko during that faraway summer when I saw her giving the breast to her pale blonde baby." Passages such as this made me wince. Vera seems to be using her writing to Flavia purely for her own gratification. She is, unconsciously, a writer of abusive letters.
The translators seem to have found this a difficult text. Vera's faux-naif posing leads them, occasionally, into awkward English. I am sorry to sound so churlish about a writer I have so much admired. I look forward to Dacia Maraini's next book.
Michele Roberts is a novelist and 2001 Booker Prize judge
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