Fiction
The Practice of Parting
by Mary Barbara Tolusso
There are three of them: Emma, David, and her. They live in a boarding school, a few steps from a border immersed in woods and wind. We feel the weight of history, a Trieste that is never named, but that permeates the pages. Far from their parents, these teenagers grow up educated in order and in controlling their passions. Theirs is an exclusive triangle: an easy friendship with the exuberant Emma, a seductive competition with David, the boy with the sharp heart. The three love each other with the unreserved impulse of adolescence and with the terror of abandoning themselves to true love. As long as they grow up within the protected walls of the school, life passes comfortably between study, sport, and walks on the park’s paths, under thin oak branches and watchful eyes. They do not ask themselves too much about their future, nor why their education is designed to face endless fates. They don’t imagine that their lives, once so intertwined, will be divided. Years later, only a photograph remains to connect them, as well as the mystery of their infinitely long and healthy existence. Almost nothing is left of the great friendship with Emma, of the love for David, or of the passion for Nicholas, the young anarchist encountered over the border. And yet they cannot help but chase that lost time, asking: what were they destined for, what becomes of their privilege in a world where the exclusive are ultimately excluded? The Practice of Parting is above all a remarkable love story written in unique prose, mournful and steeped in poetry. A visionary novel that exposes the most terrible of human desires—what drives us to dream of a longer existence, of eternal love. It’s impossible not to think of Ishiguro. It’s impossible not to think, at the same time, that we are confronted with a unique voice, which will linger in the reader’s heart.
