Kite. No, I didn’t know there was a Dutch village called Wouw either, but here it is, halfway between Roosendaal and Bergen op Zoom, and it is indeed normal, in land that was so fertile that it earned the inhabitants the nickname ‘porridge farmers’. There was once a castle, there is a star restaurant, but we reserve the biggest wow of Wouw for the colossal St. Lambertus Church that towers high above the village: many medium-sized municipalities would spend a small campaign for such a church.
Mol’s mini library remains a little further away closer to the ground, but the cupboard is well stocked, with the most remarkable title Tormenting love by Elena Ferrante, the writer who became a world star thanks to the cycle The genius girlfriend (2011-2014). Tormenting love is her debut, the translation by Manon Smits was published in 1996. This copy spent its first reading life in the De Boekwijzer library in Bergen op Zoom; on the sticker on the spine ‘Ferrante, Elena’ is written in exemplary school notebook.
The beginning of Tormenting love is now also worth a ‘wow’. “My mother drowned on the night of May 23, my birthday, in the stretch of sea near the place called Spaccavento, a few kilometers from Minturno.” And if that first blow isn’t worth a dollar, a nice picture of the holidays that the family spent there “when my father still lived with us” follows: “Every morning we girls drank a raw egg, walked between the tall reeds over dirt paths to the sea and went swimming.” To finish the first paragraph, Ferrante reveals that on the night of her mother’s death there was a pounding on the door of the old holiday home, but the old owner did not dare to open it.
Delia, the narrator of Tormenting lovedid not have a pleasant relationship with her mother Amalia. When he visited her in Rome and started cleaning the house without being asked and chatting with shopkeepers with whom Delia barely had contact. Mother and daughter spoke a different language: Amalia dialect, Delia Italian. Neither was able to transition smoothly into the other’s language. About that dialect “A long list of words that ended in a consonant, as if the final vowel had fallen into an abyss and the rest of the word was whining dully with sadness.”
After death, the arrangements follow and Delia has to do this together with Filippo, her mother’s brother, who, to her frustration, always stood up for his brother-in-law and not for his sister, while, well, read along: “He was her brother, he had seen her swollen a hundred times from the blows, the punches, the kicks; and yet he had never lifted a finger to help her. For fifty years he had continued to insist on his solidarity with his brother-in-law.”
The victim herself told her daughters: “That’s just the way he is. He doesn’t know what he’s doing and I don’t know what to say to him.” Those daughters hated her for it, even when father – a painter of small talent and great frustrations – had already left. In between those complicated family matters, Delia wants to find out why her mother, who was unadorned when alive, was found wearing only a bra, which turns out to have been bought in a lingerie store full of unpleasant figures. Delia has little choice: despite her revulsion, she must face her past.
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