THEThe best book I read this summer is the longseller of Concita De Gregorio, From mother to daughter. The title makes you think of the relationship between a mother and a daughter, but in reality the chain, or if you prefer the scrolls of the shell on the cover, is much wider, reaching all the way to the grandmother’s grandmother.
Very different women who pass on, sometimes skipping a generation, a mysterious power over things and people, to the point of being mistaken for witches. At the center of the story is the circle of life love between the grandmother and her granddaughter, between Marilù and Adè.
Adè is the girl who lives a virtual lifewithout physical contact, not with the kids but not even with the sea and the sun, who, wherever he is, compiles a list of ways to commit suicide, and is unable to face existence without psychotropic drugs.
Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Marilù is the girl of the generation that changed the world after the war. She is a woman who can sometimes be a victim and sometimes a master: she becomes a mother at sixteen, she makes the arrogant billionaire believe that he is the father, she is adopted by an actress (real Angela Molina), she ends up on the island of the novel divided by the love of two men, she is spied on in the town from behind the closed shutters, hated and respected, envied and admired. In the novel there is a secret, or rather there are twoone remains not fully revealed and we certainly won’t do it here.
“From mother to daughter” by Concita De Gregorio (Feltrinelli).
Reading it is a pleasure because Concita succeeds in everything she doesand she has done practically everything, reporter and writer, director and presenter, TV and theatre.
Concita De Gregorio (photo Getty Images).
She paid a very high price for the scandalous power of blackmail and intimidation that Italian law allows powerful people towards journalists, when she found herself having to deal with the complaints accumulated when she directed with her personal assets the Unityin the years of the zenith of Berlusconi’s power.
Now, at the age when men of our generation are in crisis, she is giving her best as a writer. And even as an actress.
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All articles by Aldo Cazzullo.