Sober and elegant, with a bare writing style, “A Minimal Unhappiness” focuses on the relationship between a daughter and her mother to explore unhappiness as a place. Carmen Verde draws us in to the last page as if it were a desired shipwreck. Finalist for the prestigious Strega Prize, this debut novel marks a milestone in Italian narrative in recent years.
Annetta has a tiny body, her bones do not grow. This smallness embarrasses the beautiful and elegant Sofia Vivier, her mother, a woman shrouded in mystery who lives like a guest in her own house. Sofia stubbornly takes on her role as mother, but she drenches her daughter day after day in a vague and abstract unhappiness. On the other hand, the father is a stranger to them. The arrival of Clara Bigi, who comes to establish order, turns everything upside down: with her harsh and absurd impositions, the little girl’s world begins to crumble, and she feels increasingly trapped in an endless race to win Sofia’s love. As events unfold, Annetta throws herself completely into her mother, cultivating her unhappiness as a gift rather than a curse.
A book about mothers and daughters, unhappiness as a place of choice and the secrets that populate all families.
Life is no less important than literature.
The unhappiness of our mothers should be studied in school.
«Unhappiness is not just a spiritual category. If it were, if it were an exclusively intimate matter, relegated to the innermost recesses of our being, no one would be able to see it. No. Unhappiness is a place, a physical place, a dark room in which we choose to be. So much so that when we light a candle, we immediately shield the flame so that no one can probe inside.»
*Original content provided by the publisher
«A Minimal Unhappiness is a book full of obsessions and sweetness, cruelty and piety, in which the details reveal a world as familiar as it is alienated. It is there, precisely on that border, where Carmen Verde points out an accurate and evocative writing and characters with the moral balance and dark sensuality of those of Némirovsky or Lispector. ―Veronica Raimo
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/una-minima-infelicidad
