The book was selling really well, I realized in the following days. The most conspicuous sign was the increasing number of phone calls from Gina, who reported a notice in such-and-such a newspaper, or announced some invitation from a bookstore or cultural group, without ever forgetting to greet me with the kind words: The book is taking off, Dottoressa Greco, congratulations. Thank you, I said, but I wasn’t happy. The articles in the newspapers seemed superficial, they confined themselves to applying either the enthusiastic matrix of l’Unità or the ruinous one of the Corriere. And although Gina repeated on every occasion that even negative reviews were good for sales, those reviews nevertheless wounded me and I would wait anxiously for a handful of favorable comments to offset the unfavorable ones and feel better. In any case, I stopped hiding the malicious reviews from my mother; I handed them all over, good and bad. She tried to read them, spelling them out with a stern expression, but she never managed to get beyond four or five lines before she either found a point to quarrel with or, out of boredom, took refuge in her mania for collecting. Her aim was to fill the entire album and, afraid of being left with empty pages, she complained when I had nothing to give her.
The review that at the time wounded me most deeply appeared in Roma. Paragraph by paragraph, it retraced the one in the Corriere, but in a florid style that at the end fanatically hammered at a single concept: women are losing all restraint, one has only to read Elena Greco’s indecent novel to understand it, a novel that is a cheap version of the already vulgar Bonjour Tristesse. What hurt me, though, was not the content but the byline. The article was by Nino’s father, Donato Sarratore. I thought of how impressed I had been as a girl by the fact that that man was the author of a book of poems; I thought of the glorious halo I had enveloped him in when I discovered that he wrote for the newspapers. Why that review? Did he wish to get revenge because he recognized himself in the obscene family man who seduces the protagonist? I was tempted to call him and insult him atrociously in dialect. I gave it up only because I thought of Nino, and made what seemed an important discovery: his experience and mine were similar. We had both refused to model ourselves on our families: I had been struggling forever to get away from my mother, he had burned his bridges with his father. This similarity consoled me, and my rage slowly diminished.
But I hadn’t taken into account that, in the neighborhood, Roma was read more than any other newspaper. I found out that evening. Gino, the pharmacist’s son, who lifted weights and had become a muscular young man, looked out from the doorway of his father’s shop just as I was passing, in a white pharmacist’s smock even though he hadn’t yet taken his degree. He called to me, holding out the paper, and said, in a fairly serious tone, because he had recently moved up a little in the local section of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement party: Did you see what they’re writing about you? In order not to give him the satisfaction, I answered, they write all sorts of things, and went on with a wave. He was flustered, and stammered something, then he said, with explicit malice: I’ll have to read that book of yours, I understand it’s very interesting.
That was only the start. The next day Michele Solara came up to me on the street and insisted on buying me a coffee. We went into his bar and while Gigliola served us, without saying a word, in fact obviously annoyed by my presence and perhaps also by her boyfriend’s, he began: Lenù, Gino gave me an article to read where it says you wrote a book that’s banned for those under eighteen. Imagine that, who would have expected it. Is that what you studied in Pisa? Is that what they taught you at the university? I can’t believe it. In my opinion you and Lina made a secret agreement: she does nasty things and you write them. Is that right? Tell me the truth. I turned red, I didn’t wait for the coffee, I waved to Gigliola and left. He called after me, laughing: What’s the matter, you’re offended, come here, I was joking.
