At first, a family like many others, unhappy in their own way. A present and insecure father, an absent and eccentric mother, a daughter torn between them, happiness and fidelity. Cracks are everywhere, but they are covered by small glimpses of normality, by life that must go on. Then one day, everything falls apart, for each in their own way, and under the rubble remains her, the little girl everyone wanted for themselves and no one loved enough; she, the heart of a body that no longer exists.
Alessandra Carati, with her usual lucid empathy, recounts in Atto di famiglia (Neri Pozza, 2026, €18.00, 180 pages. Also available as an ebook) the dramatic yet possible end of a family, giving space to the versions of all the actors involved, often discordant, contradictory, but no less truthful. A scathing novel that tells us that evil doesn't always require violated bodies, but can also insinuate itself behind silence, cowardice, and lies.
We asked Alessandra Carati how we could define the family that is the protagonist of her novel:
The point is precisely the impossibility of defining it. In fiction, you don't move within categories; you explore specific objects, specific people, specific situations, each with its own nature and reality. And, for this reason, they are irreducible to definition. While writing the book, I purposely avoided using terms like 'toxic relationship,' 'dysfunctional family,' 'abuse,' because they are broad words that fail to fully capture the multiplicity and uniqueness of what can happen in a particular family. When the story remains on the level of the minimal things, the little, the nothingness that make up our days—our lives—we can even shorten the distance and recognize ourselves in these characters, even if only in a small way.
How are the father and mother similar and how are they different?
At first glance, they might seem like two characters who function and view the world very differently. If you pay attention to the quotations in the epigraphs that open their respective chapters, you'll notice that they mention two opposing seasons—summer for him, winter for her—but in both, the same danger is evoked: the possibility of being killed. Ultimately, both end up moving along the same axis of relationship, domination, occupying its two poles alternately—the one who dominates, the one who is dominated. Neither manages to escape the other. They turn affection into the opposite feeling, until it becomes stable and lasting. They will remain trapped for life in mutual resentment.
How does the daughter deal with what is happening in her family?
The only innocent character is the daughter; but only at the beginning, when she is a child. When the reader meets her at two successive times—at twenty and then at thirty-seven—he realizes that she too has learned her parents' language of relationships. She has, in turn, become adept at enacting the aggression she has witnessed, directing it even toward herself. She has learned to make the best of the situation in which she grew up, exploiting every advantage her role offers her. When she happens to meet someone outside the family, she discovers that things between human beings can be different and that she can invent a new psychic alphabet.
How much of what we call “love” is actually a need for control?
There's a strange need to separate in language what always appears spurious in experience, as if a pure feeling could exist in reality. Sometimes, the people we're closest to are the same ones we feel deep anger or resentment toward. All these conflicting forces exist within us in the same space and—sometimes—at the same time; without canceling each other out, without being resolved. This is what happens to the daughter: in the end, she manages to inhabit her contradictory feelings without giving in to the urge to deny them, avoiding the risk of being torn apart by them.