A book a day: Postorino Rosella: I just loved you

Original Language: Italian

Títutulu Original: I just loved you

Translation: Miguel Izquierdo

Year of publication: 2023

Valoración: Advisable

The books communicate and talk to each other. If not, how to explain the connections between I just loved you and three books recently read and reviewed here, as they are They wouldn’t kill a fly, prohibited games y Diaries of oblivion?

You will see, I just loved you It is the story of some Bosnian children (of different origins) that, in full siege of Sarajevo, are sent to Italy. But the years go by and there they have to stay and try to (re) make their lives as they can.

And so, the aforementioned connections appear: with Diaries of oblivion in the permanent feeling of uprooting and “foreigners”, both on one side and another; with Prohibited games In childhood missing before the adult world, in the management of the symbolic and in the attempts we say stiffened to channel anger and pain; with They wouldn’t kill a fly In that normalized violence that persecutes some of the protagonists of the book through time and space.

Moreover, the novel opens with an appointment of Slavenka Drakulic and one of the girls is called Nana Drakulic, so she posterin – Drakulic is obvious.

Returning to the novel, Strega finalist in 2023, this is divided into 4 parts depending on the temporal moment of the facts that are narrated. This allows a reading of it as “formation novel”, for that of the passage of childhood to maturity.

In that sense, it seems to me that the importance of the past and the events of childhood in adult life is very well treated (is Marcel Proust here?). It is also remarkable how the author weaves, from the initial pages of the novel, the network of relationships that are established between the different characters and their evolution over time.

Another aspect to mention is the management of children’s voices in the first part of the novel. I think the author is right with the tone and avoids falling into the excessively melodramatic.

– I don’t want to be there, I don’t like it. Here I see the sky.

– In Sarajevo you never looked at heaven.

– In Sarajevo was mom.

However, the melodrama appears in the final stretch of the book and some of the scenes or situations are dangerously approaching the telefilm (yes, of those on Sundays by the afternoons). We already know that life and death are made of coincidences, but I think that Postorino is going a little hand and strength in excess according to what situations.

In any case, a recommended novel about abandonments and reunions and about the right to salvation in a strange world in which, although they exist, it is difficult to find grief.