Give me danger

Tea Hacic-Vlahovic is one of the few contemporary writers for whom terms such as ‘cult author’, ‘underground’ and ‘punk’ can be used. These labels are no longer particularly fashionable today – they were so in the literature of the 1990s, which had more scope for raw, self-cannibalising experimentation, not only in Italy – Irvine Welsh and his Trainspotting being a case in point. Tea Hacic-Vlahovic’s latest novel, Give Me Danger (Fandango), is the most explicit manifesto of this ‘rough’ aesthetic. ‘Give me a sense of danger,’ the editor says to the protagonist, a writer, and she obeys: she shares her hotel room with a rat which she feeds; she follows two Croatian drug dealers into a house to find out who sold the batch of lethal drugs to Leonardo, the beloved editor who has just died – a character inspired by Giancarlo DiTrapano. This sense of ‘roughness’, combined with a feminist consciousness and an experience of migration, often becomes the story of abuse – not dramatic, but prosaic and everyday – at the hands of domineering and insecure men. It also becomes a coming-of-age story, and mistreatment is, in fact, an essential element of the female coming-of-age novel. The abuse is not necessarily physical; it also manifests as being ignored, silenced, or rendered invisible—a shrinking, a loss of weight. Themes that might otherwise appear victimising are, in Hacic-Vlahovic’s work, punk and cathartic; her heroines may be desperate at times, yet they remain in control of their destiny. The same holds true for L’anima della festa (Fandango, 2020), the author’s debut novel, set in Milan. A Croatian-American, Hacic-Vlahovic grew up in North Carolina, in the Appalachian region—a historically poor area stereotypically regarded as “redneck”—which is how the protagonist of Give Me Danger, Val, refers to her accent. In Milan, Tea studies at NABA, works in underpaid jobs and goes to countless parties, in those venues with names that anyone who lived in the city in the 2010s recognises with a pang of nostalgia. Hacic-Vlahovic is also among the few contemporary artists who genuinely leads an adventurous—she has lived in New York and Los Angeles before returning to Milan—and at times dangerous life, chronicled in an ongoing autofiction project: the Italian-language podcast “Troie radicali”. The danger referred to in the title of her latest novel is inevitable, because it is inherent in the female experience. Tea Hacic’s aim is to free her heroines from fear. Those who are fearless win, even when they lose spectacularly.

    

Tea Hacic-Vlahovic
, Give me danger
, Fandango, 240 pp., 18 euros