It’s night, it’s raining outside. Elena is woken by the doorbell. At the door are two police officers who take her to the station: she must identify a body she knows all too well. A mother, a father, a son and a police investigation that soon becomes an exploration of each character’s conscience: how do you talk about grief?

Will begins with a death that upends the life of Elena—ex-wife of Arturo and mother of 18-year-old Giacomo—like a punch to the stomach. When the body is found, a police investigation is opened. The prosecutor Improta tries to piece together what happened based on the three main characters’ stories.

Over the course of the novel, Elena, Arturo and Giacomo give first-person accounts, sketching out their own version of events. Through recollections of their previous life together, we reconstruct family dynamics: Elena’s post-natal depression, the crumbling of the couple’s relationship and the difficult position of son Giacomo, who finds his place in the world through swimming and who a few years beforehand decided to live with his father. And so, we are presented with the fragility of these human beings, caught at their most vulnerable. Observing the actions and accounts of the Volontà family, Improta— just like the writer—examines the relationship between fact, storytelling and truth.

The investigation that we follow with De Girolamo is not so much judicial as human: how do we deal with grief? What is grief, where does it come from and where does it take us? And, above all, what words do we use to talk about it? These are the big questions that the Naples-born writer asks in her second novel.

In a direct and powerful style, De Girolamo forces us to think about the social and literary expectations surrounding the way we deal with and talk about grief. She gives her characters the space they deserve: it is they who show us, through their bodies and words, through vivid and elegiac monologues, that they have different and individual perspectives on pain and life, almost suggesting that despite society’s heavy gaze, in the presence of others the individual is alone and truths are many. The contrast between the world parents live in and the world their children inhabit highlights this paradox: how are we so distant in our experience of life when we are so close?

This is a novel that reflects on the universal themes of loss, truth and confrontation with others through an intense language that feeds on matter, dirt, bodies and the tangible to bring us back to a sensory experience of the world and leave us with a glimmer of hope: what if grief were the mother of beauty?

Text by Carlotta Bernardoni-Jaquinta

Title

Volontà

Publisher

Gabriele Capelli Editore

Translation rights

Gabriele Capelli, gabrielecapellieditore@gmail.com

Publication date

2024

Pages

152

ISBN

978-88-31285-60-5

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Author

Olimpia De Girolamo

Olimpia De Girolamo was born in Naples on 6 September 1975. A philosophy graduate and specialist in the languages of stage and screen, she has lived in Switzerland since 2002, where she teaches Italian and works in theatre as a writer, actor and teacher. She is the co-artistic director of Agorà Teatro in Magliaso, a space for education and performance that she built in her garden in 2005. De Girolamo’s monologue La Mar won the Fersen Prize (Milan) and was a finalist in the Women and Theatre Prize (Rome). In 2021, she won the Opennet Prize at Solothurn Literature Days with the short story The First Step: The Assault of the Past, which became the novel All the Things That We Used to Be, published in 2022 by Gabriele Capelli Editore.