Veronica Raimo

The third vignette-style novel from the International Booker Longlist (see also [book:The Details|63313297] and [book:What I'd Rather Not Think About|61921644]). This book also is about everyday life, growing up in an odd family (but all are odd, right?).

If this was the first of the three I read--rather than the last--I probably would have enjoyed it more. While I found it fine, I did think it was the weakest of the three. It was also the funniest, I am sure some people found it laugh-out-loud funny, I found her caricatures of the mother as overbearing and the father as distracted and the brother as the favorite to be amusing but also not funny as it goes on and on.

I really like original and unusual forms of storytelling, but honestly 3 books with the same style means this style is not original or unusual but is actually really...trendy?...right now.… (mehr)

26. Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo
reader: Carlotta Brentan
OPD: 2022 translation: from Italian by Leah Janeczko (2023)
format: 4:55 Libby audiobook (224 pages in paperback)
acquired: Library loan listened: Apr 24-30
rating: 3½
genre/style: autobiographical fiction theme: Booker 2024
locations: contemporary Rome
about the author: An Italian writer, translator, and screenwriter, born in Rome in 1978

My sixth from the internation Booker longlist. I've liked them all, including this one, but oddly haven't really taken to any yet. Add this one to the list. It has its appeal. It's curious and gives us some things to think about, although she certainly doesn't openly acknowledge that.

This is chatty memoir of growing up in Rome and becoming a single writer. It has a surface that I'm uncomfortable with - it might be charming if it weren't so affected. And maybe it is charming. But what's strange to me is the indifferent lying, and unreflective irreverence, almost disdain, for integrity. This is autobiographical. But our narrator makes it a point up front that she lies freely, without any clear reason, without worrying about it. Which means that we should take note that our narrator probably lies to us constantly. We should accept this. Everything is a story with an embellishment or completely made up. Every story she tells us consistently has her lying about something to somebody, sometimes more important than other times.

What does it mean? What is it all for? And if these lies don't mean anything, why does she spend so much time dwelling on them?

We get story of a girl growing up with an older genius brother who sleeps in the upper bunk and reaches down to hold her hand all night so that she can sleep. A girl who sleeps in her grandfather's bed and sees her grandmother as a stranger made up to watch TV alone. A girl who can't answer the question, "What can you do?" in her twenties. A girl who tries to tell us she had years of teenage sex without realizing what it was. Who isn't married, recently split with her long-term boyfriend, aborted her only pregnancy in her mid-30's. And who writes, as does her brother. A grown nearly middle-aged woman, not a girl, living alone, who misses her father and grandfather, both deceased.

So I guess I'm puzzling this. I appreciate the Rome-ish sense of rapid-fire irreverence, and I wonder at that inability for our narrator to look at anything straight. It's always distorted. How can she see anything?

This is a quick fast read, for anyone interested.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/360386#8525222… (mehr)

Vero may come from one of the strangest families in Rome. Her father is a professor consumed with bizarre obsessions with hygiene and with dividing the tiny rooms in their apartment into even tinier rooms. Her mother's anxiety and paranoia are so notorious that her daughter's friends use her name as a code word for bad things happening. Her brother, renowned as the family genius, alternates being an ally and a rival to his younger sister. Vero, desperate to escape and experience the world, launches repeated attempts at freedom, most of which end in bad decisions and failure. In this book, translated from Italian and longlisted for the Booker International, Vero recounts how growing up in this crazy atmosphere led her to use storytelling and lies as an escape.

I really enjoyed this book. Veronica Raimo has a wonderfully dry, witty way of telling her stories. She has a comedian's sense of timing and wry ability to make fun of herself and her family without becoming bitter or pathetic. There's real heart in her tales, but they are never sentimental or simple. I laughed reading this book, but I also appreciated meeting this weird family and I look forward to reading more by the author.… (mehr)

Veronica pasa su infancia y adolescencia en un barrio de Roma junto con su excéntrica familia: una madre omnipresente que vive permanentemente angustiada, un padre lleno de estrafalarias obsesiones y un hermano mayor, casi perfecto, que es el centro de toda la atención. Día a día tendrá que sortear situaciones tan embarazosas como desternillantes y descubrirá la impostura como forma de mantenerse cuerda y lidiar con la vida que le ha tocado en suerte.

En esta divertidísima novela, ganadora del Premio Strega Giovani y que ha causado sensación en Italia, Raimo nos ofrece una precisa radiografía de esa energía paralizante que puede llegar a ser la familia y de la empresa siempre incierta que es convertirse en mujer.

Nada es verdad es un extraordinario retrato generacional, feroz e irreverente, sobre vínculos, pérdidas, desastres familiares y la aventura de crecer; una novela que rebosa inteligencia y que nos recuerda el valor siempre terapéutico de la comedia.… (mehr)