A phone call from the gendarmerie. A few words to tell her that Colette, her aunt, is dead. Agnès is shocked, not so much and not only by the news of the death of her only “aunt” (tatà in French), but because Colette had already died three years earlier! And yet, when she goes to identify the corpse, Agnès realizes that the body in front of her is that of her only aunt. But then who has been lying in her grave for three years? And where has Colette been all this time and why did she make everyone believe she was dead?
Starting from these events and these questions, Valérie Perrin constructs the refined plot of her new novel, Tatà (edizioni e/o, 2024, pp. 608, also e-book), five years after the worldwide success of Cambiare l'acqua ai fiori. And of her greatest success, Perrin in Tatà retains the happy narrative hand, the taste for detail, the ability to probe the psychology of the characters, line after line, word after word . In addition, she shows a more mature management of the story, a clearer desire to convey a precise message : there are no lives without a history or, worse still, useless ones. Every existence has its own parable or more parables to convey to us. All we need to do is listen, dedicate time and effort to discovering the person who has been in front of us for a long time and who we have not had the desire, the strength or the ability to know thoroughly.
This is what Agnès manages to do, driven at first by the desire to understand what mystery lies behind Colette's "double" death, then fascinated by the extraordinary daily life of a woman who appears humble, solitary and silent. A daily life that resurfaces thanks to a series of audio cassettes in which year after year Tatà talks about herself and what happens around her and the people around her. In those tapes Agnès can thus reconstruct the story of a family, hers, in which the fate of the members is inextricably linked to a circus of horrors, to the sole survivor of a Jewish family deported and exterminated by the Nazis, to the adventures of a famous pianist and those of an unscrupulous murderer, to the underhand maneuvers of an unsuspected pedophile. In the audio cassettes, however, Colette also emerges in all her vitality as a child, a girl, a woman. His passions, loves, songs that filled his teenage days and memories of those nights that are worth a lifetime emerge.
Agnès, disillusioned, emptied by the sudden end of a great love story, will find in Tatà's voice a guide to tie up the threads of her existence, to understand that every pain and every joy are not forever, but are part of the passing of time.
A flow that is never anonymous and always has something to teach us . We just have to listen.