Lost on Me

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished, they say.

Actually, the family will be just fine, as has always been the case since the dawn of time, while it's the writer who'll meet with a terrible fate in the desperate attempt to kill off mothers, fathers, and siblings only to once again find them inexorably alive.

So begins Veronica Raimo's funny and sharp novel about a family of eccentrics in Rome. Verika is an observant child, if one prone to misinterpretation. She remembers everything, from being raised with an exceptional older brother, who goes on to become a priest, while her mother is able to say about her a lackluster, well she likes to draw. Her father subdivides their small apartment into an ever increasing show more number of rooms, to give a little private space to the six people who live there. Her mother had the uncanny ability to track down her children no matter where they went, a talent that grew onerous when they were teenagers. A large, boisterous Italian family is a mixed blessing.

Not only was I a skinny little girl with no appetite, but I was growing into an adolescent who was shamelessly flat-chested. My grandmother was always eager to repeat the mantra she'd learned from her late husband: "You've got to fill at least a champagne glass."

With this, she would slap an espresso cup against my chest and burst out laughing."

Verika is a wonderful narrator of her family's life, and of her own. This novel won the Strega Giovani Prize in Italy, which makes sense because it is intelligent, wry and very funny. show less

Vero may come from one of the strangest families in Rome. Her father is a professor consumed with bizarre obsessions with hygiene and with dividing the tiny rooms in their apartment into even tinier rooms. Her mother's anxiety and paranoia are so notorious that her daughter's friends use her name as a code word for bad things happening. Her brother, renowned as the family genius, alternates being an ally and a rival to his younger sister. Vero, desperate to escape and experience the world, launches repeated attempts at freedom, most of which end in bad decisions and failure. In this book, translated from Italian and longlisted for the Booker International, Vero recounts how growing up in this crazy atmosphere led her to use storytelling show more and lies as an escape.

I really enjoyed this book. Veronica Raimo has a wonderfully dry, witty way of telling her stories. She has a comedian's sense of timing and wry ability to make fun of herself and her family without becoming bitter or pathetic. There's real heart in her tales, but they are never sentimental or simple. I laughed reading this book, but I also appreciated meeting this weird family and I look forward to reading more by the author. show less

26. Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo
reader: Carlotta Brentan
OPD: 2022 translation: from Italian by Leah Janeczko (2023)
format: 4:55 Libby audiobook (224 pages in paperback)
acquired: Library loan listened: Apr 24-30
rating: 3½
genre/style: autobiographical fiction theme: Booker 2024
locations: contemporary Rome
about the author: An Italian writer, translator, and screenwriter, born in Rome in 1978

My sixth from the internation Booker longlist. I've liked them all, including this one, but oddly haven't really taken to any yet. Add this one to the list. It has its appeal. It's curious and gives us some things to think about, although she certainly doesn't openly acknowledge that.

This is chatty memoir of growing up in Rome and becoming a single show more writer. It has a surface that I'm uncomfortable with - it might be charming if it weren't so affected. And maybe it is charming. But what's strange to me is the indifferent lying, and unreflective irreverence, almost disdain, for integrity. This is autobiographical. But our narrator makes it a point up front that she lies freely, without any clear reason, without worrying about it. Which means that we should take note that our narrator probably lies to us constantly. We should accept this. Everything is a story with an embellishment or completely made up. Every story she tells us consistently has her lying about something to somebody, sometimes more important than other times.

What does it mean? What is it all for? And if these lies don't mean anything, why does she spend so much time dwelling on them?

We get story of a girl growing up with an older genius brother who sleeps in the upper bunk and reaches down to hold her hand all night so that she can sleep. A girl who sleeps in her grandfather's bed and sees her grandmother as a stranger made up to watch TV alone. A girl who can't answer the question, "What can you do?" in her twenties. A girl who tries to tell us she had years of teenage sex without realizing what it was. Who isn't married, recently split with her long-term boyfriend, aborted her only pregnancy in her mid-30's. And who writes, as does her brother. A grown nearly middle-aged woman, not a girl, living alone, who misses her father and grandfather, both deceased.

So I guess I'm puzzling this. I appreciate the Rome-ish sense of rapid-fire irreverence, and I wonder at that inability for our narrator to look at anything straight. It's always distorted. How can she see anything?

This is a quick fast read, for anyone interested.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/360386#8525222 show less

Letto non benissimo, questa è la premessa. Leggero, divertente senza essere stupido, ruffianello.
Veronica Raimondo ha una scrittura brillante e qui lo dimostra alla grande, molto più che in Miden (che invece ho amato molto di più). Racconti di famiglia e non solo, racconti che mi hanno riportato alla mia di famiglie incasinate e disfunzionali.
Mi sono divertita, ma non rientra tra i libri memorabili, ecco: lo consiglio però a tutti quelli che abbiano la possibilità di ascoltarlo.

I enjoyed living in Raimo's world for a while. Or I should say in Veronika's world. Her family has interesting issues that she cannot quite escape, and she takes to lying all the time. Pretty much anyway. Which may explain why Vero became a writer, as did her brother.

Vero is a bit prickly, lives by her own rules, and they often make sense. They also often make for quite a bit of humor. The book bounces around from childhood to early adult to later adult and back to childhood, almost as if Vero wrote just what she was thinking about at the time. It all makes for easy reading and something akin to a sweet story in the end.

I wanted to warm to this book, but I felt chilly throughout. The reflections of a young girl growing up in herself and her family. It was alright, but it tries a little too hard to be cute.

The third vignette-style novel from the International Booker Longlist (see also [book:The Details|63313297] and [book:What I'd Rather Not Think About|61921644]). This book also is about everyday life, growing up in an odd family (but all are odd, right?).

If this was the first of the three I read--rather than the last--I probably would have enjoyed it more. While I found it fine, I did think it was the weakest of the three. It was also the funniest, I am sure some people found it laugh-out-loud funny, I found her caricatures of the mother as overbearing and the father as distracted and the brother as the favorite to be amusing but also not funny as it goes on and on.

I really like original and unusual forms of storytelling, but honestly show more 3 books with the same style means this style is not original or unusual but is actually really...trendy?...right now. show less