Cillerai’s widow can’t seem to be able to shed a tear for her husband’s death. She hasn’t cried when she found his body, she hasn’t cried at his funeral. When her daughter goes back home in France, Nives is left alone in her estate, with her animals and her little home. Nights are the toughest. She can’t sleep – her body feels numb and completely awake; one day she decides to take her favourite chicken, Giacomina, from the henhouse and keep her with her in the bedroom. Her anxiety immediately evaporates. She feels relieved and guilty: how could she replace her dead husband with a chicken?
She sleeps safe and sound now, silence and loneliness don’t scare her anymore. She even starts feeling inexplicably happy… Then one day, Giacomina ends up paralyzed in front of the tv, hypnotized by a detergent ad. Nives tries everything to wake her, but the chicken seems to be completely frozen. The only choice she is left with is to call the vet, Loriano Bottai.
Follows a phone call that seems to last a lifetime. Soon the conversation slips from the chicken to the past – the tension on the line changes, it becomes something else. Something that echoes regrets, rage and unforgivable memories – lost loves and bitterness.
Beyond Our Souls at Night, Nives is the stories we tell ourselves at night, when we can’t sleep. Stories of unspoken passions, of abandonment, of silent, heart-breaking nostalgia. We go back and forth in time with Nives, and we feel her anger, her loneliness, her desperate generosity in giving all of herself to Loriano and to the reader. With rage and infinite dignity, she breaks down and slowly takes the pieces of her life, of a life she told herself was hers, back together in one phone call – oftentimes it seems she is not even listening to the other side, but more speaking to her past self. She wants to fill the void that has haunted her for thirty years. What to do of that past, of all the roads we wanted to take we never had the guts to follow? What to do with all the years spent living lies? But ultimately – is life ever a lie, or is it just what it is? Are the sliding doors just stories we tell ourselves when we are not able to accept who we truly are?
With this new, ground-breaking novel, Naspini explores the core of who we are with such delicateness, such humanity, that it is impossible not to recognize yourself in the flawed, sad, messy, beautiful lives these characters have built for themselves. Nives’ story, her inner world, her courage in finally embracing the truth of her life, makes her story universal and necessary – she is honest, raw, clean, incorruptible. A fierce new heroine of Italian contemporary literature, one that is finally not afraid to look at herself in the mirror.
