Don’t tell anyone!

In 1972 a twelve-year-old girl leapt from her bedroom window into the River Cervo, directly below, leaving her slippers on the windowsill. Her body was found three kilometres downstream. Shortly after, her teacher went missing.

This all happened in the small Piedmontese town of Bioglio, about fifty miles northeast of Turin. The girl’s teacher was Lidia Julio and she was, as Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, the author of Untold Lessons, explains, “my grandfather’s cousin, a teacher never married and she had no children, yet she was an integral part of the family. She lived next to my grandparents in an adjoining house and ate lunch and supper with them”. Haunted by this disturbing story, Vaglio Tanet has used it as the basis of her first novel, Tornare dal bosco (“Coming back from the woods”), which first appeared in Italy last year and has now been translated into English by Jill Foulston. The book is part family memoir, part documentary project – with recourse to newspaper reports and witness interviews – and part pure invention.

In order to dramatize the story Vaglio Tanet introduces an outsider, a boy from Turin, Martino, who has been brought against his wishes to the mountains by his mother. Martino has been suffering from asthma as a result of the polluted city. On one of his lonely walks he accidentally finds the teacher hiding in an abandoned cabin. He secretly starts to bring her food. As the days go by he is increasingly agonized by her words – “Don’t tell anyone!” – and feels torn between obeying her and saving her.

The book proceeds through a series of short chapters, some barely more than a page and a half. We move from the semi-conscious teacher’s “visions” to accounts of Martino’s difficulties with his new classmates to brief dramatic episodes – an encounter with a wild boar; a not-quite romance between the substitute teacher and Martino’s mother – and flashbacks to the twelve-year-old Giovanna’s thoughts before her self-defenestration. Villagers variously remember the Battle of Caporetto, the Spanish flu and working for the partisans. It is sometimes unclear where we are in time.

The plot of Martino’s secret care for the hidden and abject teacher strongly echoes the plot of Niccolò Ammaniti’s hugely successful novel Io non ho paura (2001; I’m Not Scared, 2003) in which a boy called Michele living in the fictitious southern Italian village of Acqua Traverse accidentally discovers a boy the same age imprisoned in a ruined old house in the fields. He visits the boy, Filippo, who is half-insane with neglect and fear, and takes him food and succour, with ultimately tragic results.

But there are important differences. Ammaniti’s novel is written in the first person, which gives Michele the whole story. All we see is through the nine-year old’s eyes, and the reader has to work out slowly that Filippo has been kidnapped from a rich family in Pavia, in the north of Italy, by Michele’s own father and other men in Acqua Traverse. By contrast, Vaglio Tanet’s novel is written in the third person. This disperses the focus across the inhabitants of the town so that we are sometimes told things from a distance instead of seeing them for ourselves. We are, for example, informed rather clumsily that the teacher, speaking to Martino, “was on the verge of remembering why she’d chosen to be a teacher … because of the restlessness of children, their fears and intelligence, because of how instinctively tender they are”.

This somewhat remote relationship to the characters is compounded throughout by improbable literary allusions. Would a ten-year-old boy from Turin really be so familiar with the plot of Jane Eyre? The publisher’s note describes the book as “lushly written”, and this is true to a fault. We see how Giovanna “sensed her aunt’s approving glances settling on the back of her neck like butterflies on the gentians in the meadow”; one character sports “a nose like an upturned mushroom”; and a newborn baby has “cheeks rounded as bagpipes”.

Untold Lessons has already done well in Italy. It was shortlisted for the Strega prize and awarded the Segafredo prize for a movie adaptation, and one could certainly imagine its dispersed narrative and frequent jump-cutting working well on screen. Despite its failings on the page, this is a strong debut by an emerging novelist and a loving work of restitution.

Clare Pettitt is Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent book is Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, politics, form, 2022

The post Don’t tell anyone! appeared first on TLS.