È quello che ti meriti

A wounded and stubborn marriage is a perfect time bomb. It is a duel in which the heart and the head always have the same weight, and intelligence can even complicate things. What small and great cruelties can one inflict on oneself when one chooses to stay despite everything, while the wedding ring rolls around in the pocket of one’s jeans and then in the cutlery drawer? Anger is a passion, and the violence of the time Claudia and Antonio experience together, even when it is a still time, is capable of unsettling both of them, dragging them toward an unpredictable, almost noir-like ending. For there are two mysteries to solve in this book. One is sentimental: what is this love? What is the substance that keeps two people bound together by a mutual need and a desire for revenge? But the other mystery involves a guilt that cannot be hidden forever.
He is at the top of a ladder leaning against a tree in the garden. Suddenly the ladder sways, he looks for a foothold in the branches and does not find it. She watches that back bend backward, those arms spinning in the air. He plummets to the ground, does not get up. Rescuers strap him to the stretcher, load him into the ambulance and ask her to come up. But she re-enters the house, pulls off her sweater and tidies up. This is how this very powerful novel capable of forcefully overturning all clichés about love begins. Mercilessly pointing the camera at the ferocity that disappointment and offense can generate in a couple. When he, after his heart attack, returns from the hospital, both of them — as if held together by an invisible glue — have to face their pain and their dark sides. The only common language seems to be made up of a few misunderstood words and many gestures that begin as caresses and end up looking like slaps. An escalation of cruelty that leaves one breathless. Barbara Frandino builds, scene after scene, a distillation of intelligence that reaches out to touch our deepest chords thanks to the choice of a very lucid and ruthless female voice, which proceeds by subtractions and landslides. It is through that voice and through Claudia’s eyes that the reader will decrypt the book’s double mystery. And he will find something that concerns him very closely.