A Family Tale

A room plunged in chaos, as if a bomb had exploded inside. Emma Liegi, 32 but looks 25, is asleep on her bed, unconcerned with the alarm going off. The volume becomes unbearable by the time Micol Pagnotta, 16 years old, but whose sagacious appearance makes her look 23, ventures into the room hopping round the minefield of clothes scattered on the floor.

They would seem flat mates, university students or friends. Perhaps even sisters, but you would never say they were mother and daughter, because of the scarce difference in age, and even the roles seem to be inverted. Only their love for each other is unchanged.
– Give us a kiss, says the sleepy disheveled mother puckering up her lips.
– Wash first, adolescence personified replies.
This is how A Family Novel begins. A story of mothers, daughters and pregnancies: unexpected and overwhelming is that of Micol, a young clarinet player made pregnant by her young instructor Federico. And that of Emma, who gave birth at the age of sixteen and who will become an adult mother watching her daughter’s belly grow, finally a real head of the family. A path in the opposite direction from the one that had led her fifteen years earlier to leave Livorno and her family to escape her powerful authoritarian father, Gian Pietro Liegi, and sheltering in the love affair with Agostino Pagnotta, then a cadet of the Naval Academy and today a Navy Lieutenant. For him, every time he returns home after a sea mission, mother and daughter begin their “great maneuvers,” the titanic task of transforming their daily chaos into the family nest Agostino yearns for. Fifteen years travelling around Italy, a messed up but compact micro family, no contacts with Gian Pietro and his new wife Natalia (Emma’s former nanny). And then, suddenly, Agostino’s transfer to Livorno, home to Gian Pietro and the Liegi family. Pure chance? Fate does play strange tricks; just when Gian Pietro tries to reapproach his daughter who ran away from home pregnant, Emma really comes back, but this time she is the parent of a pregnant daughter. But Gian Pietro also has other problems to deal with: his degenerative illness and a family business in deep difficulties.
A squared pregnancy, with the grandfathers (soon to be great-grandfathers) under sixty and the adults just over thirty. Anything can happen at thirty, even meeting Giorgio, the boy you thought you were in love with and who could technically be Micol’s real father, even wishing you could start all over again, even having to face the illness of a father you thought immortal. Nemesis, fate, divine design. There are many ways to call it. Ivan, Micol’s classmate, deaf from birth, would raise middle and index fingers in the shape of a V, lift his little finger and clench his fist. In sign language this means LIFE.