Ilaria or the Conquest of Disobedience by Gabriella Zalapi
Swiss Fiction
Original title – Ilaria ou la conquête de la désobéissance
Translator – Adrianna Hunter
Source – Subscription book
I must admit, Linden Editions brought out one of my favourite books last year, In Late Summer, which, like this book, was, in a way, a child’s view of the world. This book is by the Swiss-Italian Visual Artist. Her artwork is a mix of images and Family memories, it says. I can see this in the book. This is her second novel and is set in a time long gone, really, as it is set in the 80s in Italy, and what happens in the book would be much harder to do now. But it is also a book that captures divorce well from the child’s point of View. I am from a family where my parents divorced. In fact, I was maybe a year or so older than Ilaria when this happened to me.
Dad and I play a game: inventing our home and decorating it. First of all, it’s gonna be big. There’ll be loads of windows. And a big yard with a pond full of fish. Me and Ana will have separate bedrooms. Mine will be green and I’ll have the space to lay out my collection of rocks. Dad, promise you’ll make me a beautiful set of shelves. And I’ll put up a big poster of Nadia Comăneci, okay? Okay.
There’ll be masses of cupboards in the kitchen and Mom can put all her food processors in them. Dad’s making shelves for her too. She never has enough room for her recipe books. We’ll buy a beautiful gas stove. And there’ll be an attic too. Yes. We’ll put all the old furniture there.
It takes up too much room, don’t you think? You’re right.
And the walls of the living room will be really, really big.
Mom will be able to hang all her pictures. I’1l make the holes with my drill, I promise. And Ana can finally have the tortoise she’s always wanted.
Early on they have fun but it turns over time
This book sees what happens when Ilaria’s father picks her up from school one day, which he does most days, and he usually drops the young girl off with her mother, Ana. But the parents are in the middle of a divorce and her father is desperate man trying to patch things up and his plan is well is there a plan I often wondered the book is told from Ilaria pouint of view so she is both slighttly unreliable as the narrator but also has that childlike way of seeing her fasther as her father not a man that has taken her on the run and that is what he has done he picked her up in Switzerland and then head not to drop her off but toward Turin and tells her to tell her when she ses a phone box this is a reccurring event in the book the father calling the mother trying to win =her back as he has taken their daughter. There is a sense even through Ilaria’s eyes that this may be something he had done on the spur of the moment, and as we drift through a collection of friends and people they meet along the way. We see her father telling her what her mother has supposedly said, as what really is going on slowly dawns on his daughter over the coming days, from the sofa to hotels, from car to car across Italy.
He’s jumpy
He’s angry
He’s going to get nasty.
In the last few weeks Dad’s been getting wound up over the tiniest things. He says he can’t stand winter, he can’t stand the lack oflight. Sometimes he’s so angry that I can imagine pétanque balls being thrown around my head. I shudder.
And block my ears.
The other day he called me Mom’s name, Antonia.
I take my time before I open my mouth now. I start my sen-tence, watch him, and, if I see the least sign of irritation, I stop.
Answer me when I’m talking to you.
I dither.
Her Observations of her father before he took her
This is a book that has a thriller, like running to the narrative as we view this happening through the eyes of eight-year-old Ilaria, sitting next to her father as he heads across Italy on the side roads, trying to win his wife back and not get caught for taking his daughter at the same time. From call to call as they head place to place as her father tells her what her mother is supposedly saying, she sees her mother, Ana and father in her mind and slowly sees something isn’t right with her father. I loved the way we see all this through her eyes as a reader. I kept filling in the gaps of her observations of the situation from an outsider’s view. But then I know how hard divorce is on kids and parents. I remember how my mother and father were about my brother and me. I also think this is an event that might not happen as easily nowadays. If you like unreliable child narrators and road movies, this is the book for you. It is a hell of a ride alongside young Ilaria and her father. I must admit this is my book of the year so far.
