The performance by Claudia Petrucci

The Performance by Claudia Petrucci

Italian fiction

Original title – l’esercito

Source – Review copy

MY fourth book for this women in translation month sees us with another triangle like yesterday but this is a love triangle, Claudia Petrucci studied in Milan and then went to live in Perth in  Australia. Her short fiction and reportage have ranged from being realistic to experimental to science fiction. She has been published in a number of publications and has won a prize for being one of the best Italian writers under 30. This is her debut novel. Now this is a book I started last year then I put it on the side and never got back to it even thou I was enjoying it. I do love a great love triangle in a novel but this book has a darker edge to it.

Giorgia and I say goodbye to each other at the door and our last day branches off in separate directions.She lingers in the bathroom, and under the hot jet of the shower, stares at the little boy’s silhouette that appears in shadow beyond the glass. He is unusually quiet but always close by, and doesn’t leave her side; He clings to the sleeve of her bathrobe while she dries her hair. They go out together, there’s no seat on the tram, He sits on her lap.

Empty theaters carry the promise of infinite space.When the lights are off and the seats unoccupied, the dark rear depths dissolve, creating the illusion that they continue on. Giorgia likes to think that, if she wanted to, she could explore the theater for eternity, settle among the orchestra seats awaiting no one. Only when vacant, deprived of its function, does the theater show itself for what it really is an escape, an imaginary realm-and yet here, only here and nowhere else are they able to exist.

There is even her early in the book a sense of something !

The book has a usual story of a woman that had been close with one man and they had parted when she was young and she had settled down with another man and as she has done this her dreams and career had taken a back burner. So the woman in question Giorgia happens one day to bump into Mauro a man that had a flame for her and was in the theatre world she used to be in before she had settled down with her current lover Flippo and given up on her stage career. So when Mauro tries not to get her to come back on the stage and fans the flames of her hidden desire to get back on the stage we feel the book is going one way but when Gigia has some sort of mental health breakdown and is section and ends up in a clinic the two men life course is changed and now they have to try and help the woman they both love in the ways get back into the world after this massive breakdown. But as the two lovers try to help her get back into the world the lines between their love and controlling this fragile soul as it becomes about winning her back not but not her as a person

Mauro subjects me to a strict discipline. We enter the month of December with the days of the week organized by activities: he’s established a program that allows very few deviations. At set times- from seven to eight, Monday to Thursday, eleven to one on Saturdays I have to write. I start writing under his supervision, at his house, with him urging me on when I think I can’t do it. The first pages are full of just adjectives, some have scrawls that I myself can’t make out.

At first Mauro is satisfied, then he imposes a more methodical form on me, he makes me work at his computer. When I have moments of disillusionment, he tells me to focus on the exercise, he assures me that soon it will become an automatic action- from some point on, he says, the characters will begin to move independently, and in my case it will be a matter of choosing where to have Giorgia move, which memory to have her inhabit:

The way they treat her is just wrong out love but wrong.

It is hard to find books that deal with mental health breakdown and this is one such at its heart is a woman strong and loved but under all that is fragile should of a person with some obvious issues that maybe meant she was great at acting as it masked her own issues in the past but the thought of returning to the mask of the stage and the added pressure it brought was just enough to flick that switch we all have!! I deal with people in crisis as a job we help keep them in mind community ok may patients have learning disabilities but mental health challenges and when people breakdown it is always the same I loved the insight into her breakdown but also how the two men tried to mend her but they weren’t they wanted her to be what she was and that will never happen a powerful debut novel from a writer that is willing to look at the darker side of relationships after an event like this. Have you read any books that deal with mental breakdowns?

Winston’s score – A  – This book is a stunning insight into a love triangle collapsing and then the lines being redrawn.