[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_39

Nothing true, Veronica Raimo, 2022

In Italy, being against the Church is quite mainstream, even if you don't say it on television and still go to mass on Sundays. But being against the family is definitely not the case. Not only is it not said, but it shouldn't even be considered.

Instead, Veronica Raimo wants to say, and say out loud everything: that she doesn't like priests, that family sucks, that traditions are a trap and that after having an abortion, you don't always feel guilty. Her words are not new, but it is new to find them in an Italian novel that is not politically oriented and written by a contemporary woman about the life experience of a modern woman. “Nothing True” is a cynical and surreal manifesto on boredom, invented identities, and a rhetoric that needs to be revised. “It was the year in which many people I knew had children or discovered they had celiac disease. It wasn't easy to deal with them in both cases without being co-opted into one of the two topics with a proselytizing ardor. It is even more difficult to joke or not show the necessary interest. Having children or eliminating gluten coincided with a radical change in life. Everything was traced back to that founding watershed of experience. I was surrounded by reborn people, able to distinguish their existence between a before and an after. The children who reconfigured priorities and ambitions, who attributed new qualities to joy; the diet for celiacs had resolved all the possible symptoms of discomfort: insomnia, anxiety, headaches, constipation. I had all those symptoms, but I refused to do analysis and preferred to think of myself as a person with a bad character”.

Veronica Raimo tells us that time passes, that stories repeat themselves and end up resembling each other,and that even if you have children or become apostles of God - or some new diet - life remains meaningless; only the pain in the ass increases.