Ilaria, or The Conquest of Disobedience
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Kidnapped by her troubled father, a young girl navigates life on a road trip across 1980s Italy in this stunning, cinematic English-language debut.
One day in May 1980, 8-year-old Ilaria gets into her father’s car after school. As they stop at a series of highway hotels, traversing the north of Italy, the child thinks of her mother and promises herself not to cry anymore. She learns to drive and to lie, discovers Trieste, Bologna, a boarding school in Rome, a sunny rural life in Sicily.
Thanks to the games they play, the hit songs they sing at the tops of their voices on the road, and the kind people Ilaria meets along the way, the kidnapping almost seems like a normal childhood. But her father drinks too much, nervous in a cloud of cigarette smoke. If he takes her by the hand, she thinks it’s better not to pull it away. Ilaria observes and feels everything.
In gripping, precise prose, this poignant novel takes us inside the mind of a little girl who must grow up on her own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Swiss writer Zalapi makes her English-language debut with a propulsive coming-of-age story set against the political violence of Italy's Years of Lead. Ilaria, the narrator, is eight when her father, Fulvio, abducts her from her Geneva school in May 1980. She was hanging upside down on the monkey bars like her idol, the gymnast Nadia Comăneci, and now her life is turned upside down. On an interminable road trip through Italy, her father explains nothing when she asks about her mother and sister, with whom she's been living since her parents separated. Ilaria and her father sleep in small hotels and talk to strangers in bars, where Ilaria plays pinball and Fulvio drinks too much. After they run out of money, they begin to falsely claim lost jewelry and other valuables at train stations so they can pawn the items. Zalapi sketches a clear and sensitive portrait of her young narrator, showing how Ilaria's allegiance is torn between her mother, whom she misses, and her father, whom she worries about leaving. Meanwhile, her entry into the world of adults is shaded by horrific events like the 1980 Bologna massacre by far-right terrorists. This leaves a mark.
