r.vivian literary agency

At seventy-two years old, the Father is a man bent by life: a retired high school teacher, an unpublished writer who has never found the courage to have his manuscripts read, the Father has developed a clear and incontrovertible idea of women: they are creatures who , if you love, they can only betray you and leave you. His mother left him when he was still in diapers, to save himself during the bombing of Treviso. And he was left by his wife, who died at a young age of nail melanoma. The Father raises the two children with the help of his sister: the Aunt, a Venetian commoner with outspoken manners, a biting tongue and a fervent, but all facade, religiosity. The children – Stefano and Anna – are treated unequally: to Anna, more docile, the Father gives a lukewarm benevolence while Stefano, older than three years, with a proud and arrogant character, is the object of constant and never concealed hostility. From an early age, Stefano and Anna lean on each other to face the loss of their mother and the coldness of their father. Their relationship evolves from the adoration of the small towards the great, to the acts of violence and manipulation of the great towards the small, finally to a sentimental relationship that leads, during adolescence, to the first sexual relationships. When the aunt discovers that Anna and Stefano are lovers, the boy, now a university student, is sent away from home. He will never come back to you.

Years go by and Anna and Stefano each try to build an independent life for themselves. After a degree in Oriental Languages, Anna worked for some time in an ESF training institution and then embarked on the path of freelance copywriter; the discomfort of being alone in the family leads her to develop a strange phobia: terrified at the thought of dying of the same disease as her mother, Anna is unable to look at her hands, which she hides under a pair of white gloves. Paolo, the man she will marry, helps her to get rid of it, but when the marriage ends Anna falls back into her trouble: her life raft. The economic difficulties following the separation force her to return to her childhood home. The Aunt, no longer self-sufficient, has been hospitalized in a facility for the elderly and it is Anna who takes care of the Father. Elderly, exhausted, greedy and hypochondriac, the Father has put aside his books and his literary ambitions to devote himself to a bizarre and macabre pastime: every day he studies the files in the General Register of unidentified corpses of the Labanof, the Anthropology Laboratory and Forensic Odontology of the University of Milan. In addition to looking after him, Anna begins to write stories for him: the invented reconstruction of the last hours of life of these unknown individuals. The narration gives them an identity and the Father a form of peace. However, Anna is not pacified: her life appears suspended to her, and she knows well that the responsibility for this lies in the never resolved relationship with her brother.

In the meantime Stefano has become an esteemed heart surgeon, but his love life is disastrous; the only true bond that he has managed to keep is the one with his sister, whom he continues to see regularly, in detached meetings but pregnant with a past that makes them very dense. A bond, the one between Anna and Stefano, which has now become an addiction, and which ends up sabotaging the lives of both.

The story develops on three narrative levels: the account - built on swinging dialogues - of a long evening between father and daughter, which will become for Anna an awareness in view of the final decision; the emergence of memories that reconstruct the history of the family in flashes over forty years, narrated from Anna's point of view; and the stories of the unidentified corpses of Labanof, written by Anna and annotated by the Father: lives devastated and left on the sidelines, which translate the sense of precariousness of the characters, but also their desire for redemption and rebirth.

In an alternation of dark and light colors, elegiac and grotesque, "The Abandonment" tells the complexity of family ties and how love can sometimes take unpredictable forms, but no less vibrant and authentic for this.

 

 

 

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