Originally published in Italy as Niente di Vero, or “Nothing True”, Veronica Raimo’s autofictional fourth novel comes garlanded with praise and prizes. The story of a young woman growing up in Rome in a dysfunctional family who goes on to become a writer, it’s cruder and more slippery than Fleabag, funnier but less insightful than Deborah Levy’s “living autobiographies”, and ultimately frustrating for the way in which its author, for all her startling candour, somehow eludes our gaze.
We first meet not Veronica, but her parents, via their neuroses: a mother whose clear favourite is her son Christian (Raimo does have a brother called Christian, also a writer) and who requires near-constant telephone contact with both her children; a father who subdivides their tiny apartment in Rome by throwing up more and more internal walls and whose obsession with germs leads him to wipe everything down with alcohol – including his kids. The voice of the novel’s narrator – known as Verika, Vero, Oca, Scarafona, Smilzi and a host of other names – is wry and detached, often knowingly droll, as though she is sitting at a bar and telling you her story in disarranged fragments, each one polished to become a “bit”. We follow as she jumps about in time through a childhood marked by constipation, flashers, parental anxiety and shared boredom, and on into an adolescence in which subterfuge of various kinds becomes a necessary form of psychological escape. We learn that as an adult, she is a child-free writer and translator who has spent a lot of time in Berlin, as Raimo has, and are given glimpses – largely absurdist, but occasionally poignant – of heartbreak, an abortion and her father’s death.
