A review of "Le cose che non diciamo"

“We all have huge blind spots right before our eyes, in the sense that despite everything we think we know, we never really manage to understand how others see us. And this was also true of Artie Dam.” Artie is a respected secondary school teacher who lives with his wife Evie in a coastal town in Massachusetts. Their solid marriage spans more than thirty years, and their grown-up son—Rob—works as an engineer and is going through a rough patch with his wife Francesca, a successful pianist. It is a modest and peaceful life, with a few wounds linked to Artie’s family past and the social divide with his wife that makes itself felt at times. Yet within Artie, the will to live is quietly fading day by day, giving way to loneliness, to the sense of not being truly understood and of being condemned to this state without being able to do anything to free himself. “I didn’t want to die; I simply didn’t want to live any more.” It is during a boat trip that the professor hits rock bottom and then rises again – metaphorically and physically – from his predicament. Artie discovers a secret concerning his family that forever changes the way he views the world, perceives people and the bonds between them. He remains obsessed with the question of whether free will exists, how much choice one truly has, and how much this has to do with the truth and the possibility of exercising it. “To speak the truth means saying things nobody wants to hear. And even if they do want to hear them, they don’t care as much as they should. Or they don’t understand. Being alive used to be a private experience. Now he understood that.” Artie feels that his inability to fully express himself distances him from others, and he finds (temporary) refuge only in his relationship with his students, who still have a future and therefore the chance to find an escape from a reality dominated by social inequality and underlying intolerance.

‘Each of us carries within us a vast, unknowable universe,’ writes Elizabeth Strout, whose writing—always imbued with grace—brings to life, with simplicity and a light touch, characters brimming with humanity and vitality. “Loneliness does not stem from having no one around, but from the inability to communicate the things that seem important to us, or from attaching value to certain thoughts that others deem unacceptable.” Artie’s anguish is our own; we can feel his wounded heart. And for this reason, Artie, without realising it, is no longer alone.

Elizabeth Strout
, "The Things We Don’t Say
", Einaudi, 208 pp., 19 euros