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Hollow Heart
In this courageous, inventive, and intelligent novel, Viola di Grado tells the story of a suicide and what follows. She has given voice to an astonishing vision of life after life, portraying the awful longing and sense of loss that plague the dead, together with the solitude provoked by the impossibility of communicating. The afterlife itself is seen as a dark, seething place where one is preyed upon by the cruel and unrelenting elements. The Hollow Heart will frighten as it provokes, enlighten as it causes concern. If ever there were a novel that follows Kafka’s prescription for a book to be a frozen axe for the sea within us, it is The Hollow Heart.
176 pages, Paperback
First published February 13, 2013
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About the author
Viola Di Grado
24 books143 followersViola Di Grado was born in Catania in 1987. She lived in Kyoto, Leeds and London, where she earned her MA in East Asian philosophies. Her widely translated first novel- Settanta acrilco trenta lana (70% Acrylic 30% Wool) published when she was 23- was the winner of the prestigious 2011 Campiello First Novel Award and the Rapallo Opera Prima Award. It was also longlisted for the Strega Award and for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2014. Her short stories and essays have been published in numerous magazines and journals.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 75 reviews
June 23, 2020
I would strongly advise against reading a book about death and decomposition the week after your cat dies.
rtc
rtc
May 31, 2020
This was a book about a 25-yr old women, Dorotea, who committed suicide by slitting her wrists in a bathtub. And a small part of the book was about when she was still alive. But the larger portion of the book was when she was dead. Either the dead women describing how her body was slowly disintegrating (in detail) and getting eaten up by worms and bacteria and such until she was all bone. And her trying to communicate with the living and hanging out with people who were dead, and them talking with each other. I think perhaps if this were a novella I could have given it a better rating but after a while it was the author pretty much repeating herself but in different florid ways.
February 26, 2019
As soon as I started reading Hollow Heart, I was vividly reminded of Di Grado's debut, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, which I read a couple of years ago. The books mirror each other in many ways: both are about loss, grief and depression; both feature a dysfunctional mother and daughter; both veer in strange and unexpected directions. The writing is so distinctive too, a voice I immediately recognised (anyone who enjoys Yelena Moskovich's writing should pick up something by Viola Di Grado. And vice versa, of course). The difference is that the protagonist of this book is dead. Dorotea Giglio killed herself at the age of 25: Hollow Heart is the story of the aftermath, and it's narrated by her ghost.
The book opens with an epic portrayal of Dorotea's death setting out from her home city, Catania, and spreading across the planet, 'anatomy [becoming] geography'. Yet surprisingly little changes for Dorotea after her suicide. She still goes to her job in a stationery shop (where her boss turns out to be the only person who can see her). She hangs around at home, watching her mother and haunting the bathroom she died in. She meets other ghosts. She imagines leaving messages for former acquaintances she knows to have died (I loved these messages, their dry humour and matter-of-factness about death). She also regularly visits the cemetery, where she delves below ground and documents the decomposition of her physical body in microscopic detail.
Another similarity with Di Grado's debut: both books are (there's no way of avoiding this dreaded word) quirky, but much darker than the term usually implies. The blurb doesn't quite describe it accurately, and perhaps oversells the novel as a portrayal of the afterlife – but this is understandable, as it's impossible to concisely capture all the avenues it wanders down.
So Hollow Heart can be somewhat frustrating: it hares off on peculiar tangents rather than addressing what would seem to be the important issues. Dorotea's reasons for killing herself, for example, are never really elucidated – it feels almost like something she just randomly does on impulse. It's obvious not all dead people join the world of ghosts, but it's unclear what the logic is: post-death Dorotea's social circle includes other suicides, but also people killed in accidents, a couple of children and even a foetus.
When I read 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, I was so struck by its originality that I ordered Hollow Heart straight away. In turn, Hollow Heart had me googling to find out whether Di Grado has written anything else since this. (The answer: she has, the novel Bambini di ferro, but it hasn't been translated into English yet.) I just love the meandering strangeness of her style. I wouldn't want to read books like this all the time, but as an occasional treat they are marvellous.
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On Via Crispi there's a gray concrete apartment building that was built in the seventies, and on the fourth floor there's an apartment full of dust. Inside the apartment there's a mother crying over the kitchen sink, a bowl covered with meat sauce in her hands, soapsuds on her fingers. The water is running. There's an empty bedroom at the end of the hallway. There's a yellow bed, perfectly made, and biology textbooks piled high on the shelves. That mother is my mother: we live together, but I don't know how to reach her. That empty bedroom is where I live, but there's no proof of that fact.
The book opens with an epic portrayal of Dorotea's death setting out from her home city, Catania, and spreading across the planet, 'anatomy [becoming] geography'. Yet surprisingly little changes for Dorotea after her suicide. She still goes to her job in a stationery shop (where her boss turns out to be the only person who can see her). She hangs around at home, watching her mother and haunting the bathroom she died in. She meets other ghosts. She imagines leaving messages for former acquaintances she knows to have died (I loved these messages, their dry humour and matter-of-factness about death). She also regularly visits the cemetery, where she delves below ground and documents the decomposition of her physical body in microscopic detail.
Another similarity with Di Grado's debut: both books are (there's no way of avoiding this dreaded word) quirky, but much darker than the term usually implies. The blurb doesn't quite describe it accurately, and perhaps oversells the novel as a portrayal of the afterlife – but this is understandable, as it's impossible to concisely capture all the avenues it wanders down.
"It's only reality," I told myself, "It can't hurt you."
So Hollow Heart can be somewhat frustrating: it hares off on peculiar tangents rather than addressing what would seem to be the important issues. Dorotea's reasons for killing herself, for example, are never really elucidated – it feels almost like something she just randomly does on impulse. It's obvious not all dead people join the world of ghosts, but it's unclear what the logic is: post-death Dorotea's social circle includes other suicides, but also people killed in accidents, a couple of children and even a foetus.
When I read 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, I was so struck by its originality that I ordered Hollow Heart straight away. In turn, Hollow Heart had me googling to find out whether Di Grado has written anything else since this. (The answer: she has, the novel Bambini di ferro, but it hasn't been translated into English yet.) I just love the meandering strangeness of her style. I wouldn't want to read books like this all the time, but as an occasional treat they are marvellous.
TinyLetter | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr
February 10, 2020
In di Grado’s second novel, a suicide victim narrates her short life and surprising afterlife. Twenty-five-year-old Dorotea Giglio slit her wrists in the bathtub in July 2011 and expired in “a grim mojito of mint bubble bath and blood.” Over the next four years she chronicles her physical decomposition as well as her spirit’s enduring search for love. Flashbacks to childhood reveal that she never met her father and that her mother, a fashion photographer, struggled with depression. Indeed, suicide runs in the family: Aunt Lidia walked into the river, à la Virginia Woolf, in 1970.
The border between life and death is permeable; Dorotea can interact with her corpse and people she once knew. She continues her former work and routines but most people experience her as a breath on the neck or a fragment of violin music. The only one who sees her is her elderly boss at a stationer’s. Meanwhile, the dead form a bizarre alternative community with macabre habits. Dorotea walks a dead fetus on a leash and she and her friends travel to London to see Amy Winehouse give a posthumous performance.
When Dorotea falls in love with new colleague Alberto, her emotions soar even though her physical heart has shrivelled: “Inside me, along with love, ammonia developed, and a swarm of larvae took up residence in my interior.” In alternately clinical and whimsical language, with fresh metaphors that have survived the translation from Italian admirably, di Grado examines the secret sadness passed down through families.
The border between life and death is permeable; Dorotea can interact with her corpse and people she once knew. She continues her former work and routines but most people experience her as a breath on the neck or a fragment of violin music. The only one who sees her is her elderly boss at a stationer’s. Meanwhile, the dead form a bizarre alternative community with macabre habits. Dorotea walks a dead fetus on a leash and she and her friends travel to London to see Amy Winehouse give a posthumous performance.
When Dorotea falls in love with new colleague Alberto, her emotions soar even though her physical heart has shrivelled: “Inside me, along with love, ammonia developed, and a swarm of larvae took up residence in my interior.” In alternately clinical and whimsical language, with fresh metaphors that have survived the translation from Italian admirably, di Grado examines the secret sadness passed down through families.
March 20, 2017
I read this in 2015 and it had the strangest effect on me, much like waking from a strange dream and trying to regain your equilibrium. I wasn't reading it for review, simply for pleasure- so I decided to share my review today.
https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com... my blog:
"In fact, people here dislike suicides. We're the pariahs of the deceased community, and they avoid us like the plague. We are the ones who discarded the only thing they desire."
This is a novel I fell in love with back in 2015, one of the few in a list of novels I wish I haven't yet read so I can read it again for the first time. A book highlighted to an inch of it's life because the writing is gorgeous. It's disturbing, a young woman has committed suicide and we follow her in the aftermath. Nothing romantic about it, because suicide is not sexy. As she tells us herself, "No, I didn't die of love. I really wish I had: I'd be carrying on the legacy of literary figures like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary. Instead, you recover from love." If there were any ideas of weeping lovers on her grave, the reality is nothing of the sort, the only longing, the only hunger lives inside her mother- whom she abandoned with her exit. There is no remedy for death, only a limp eternity and her consuming loneliness which unfortunately didn't die with her when she took her life, it hitchhiked. As her body rots, her musings remind us that it is far better to be infected with life and all it's ills than to be silenced by one's own hands. Just one more suicide in a family that suffers, "Aunt Clara was the pretty sister, my mother the depressed one. The eldest sister was named Lidia but she had drowned in the Cassible River, taking all her adjectives with her."
"My name is Dorotea Giglio and I'm full of flies. However much civilization might have trained you to be frightened of people like me, no one's more scared than I am."
It is now four years after her death, and though she may watch life happening, she cannot touch it, nor feel it. Her heart no longer beats, her blood no longer thrums. She hasn't ascended to any form of heaven and life goes on blissfully unaware of her, as it will one day without us. We visit the past with her haunting recollections of her family pregnant with sorrows, an absent father, a little girl who never wants to grow up and who absorbs the contagion of depression her mother exhales. A strange child, one who is afraid of her savior Jesus once she starts attending church. A family of sleepwalkers and dreamers of nightmares, women who smile only on accident and with this knowledge who can wonder why she shook off her mortal coil? Sadness grew as her body grew, she feels she is her mother's parasite and the book is darker and darker still. When she finds love, it is with a cold man, Lorenzo. When she is dead, she wants to tell someone, him... but life moves on... life cannot hear her and all she has is evidence that he has new love, she is nothing but a dead girl in his past. As she says, "My name is an abandoned house."
This novel is macabre but somehow in all it's ghastly horror it is beautiful and tender. In fact, having meant to simply peruse my highlights for this review, I find myself once again plunging into her despair and reading the novel over. Reading tastes vary, we all know this- but this book isn't really one genre because it is darkly humorous at moments, overflowing with poisonous sorrow, and somehow it celebrates life while discarding it. It remains a personal favorite, and I think if Edgar Allan Poe had a daughter it could be the character Dorotea, or maybe this author. I have been waiting a few years for another novel by Viola Di Grado, as this one still festers inside of me. Nothing yet... I'm waiting here, collecting cobwebs!
I recommend this book, but not to just anyone. It's eclectic, it's beautiful in the way of skeleton trees and crumbling haunted houses. Her afterlife is one long terrible wait, as is how I feel waiting for another novel! "Waiting is one long meal, a cannibalism." Gorgeous novel, one I would be remiss not to share with readers with tastes as strange as my own.
Available Now
Europa Editions
https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com... my blog:
"In fact, people here dislike suicides. We're the pariahs of the deceased community, and they avoid us like the plague. We are the ones who discarded the only thing they desire."
This is a novel I fell in love with back in 2015, one of the few in a list of novels I wish I haven't yet read so I can read it again for the first time. A book highlighted to an inch of it's life because the writing is gorgeous. It's disturbing, a young woman has committed suicide and we follow her in the aftermath. Nothing romantic about it, because suicide is not sexy. As she tells us herself, "No, I didn't die of love. I really wish I had: I'd be carrying on the legacy of literary figures like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary. Instead, you recover from love." If there were any ideas of weeping lovers on her grave, the reality is nothing of the sort, the only longing, the only hunger lives inside her mother- whom she abandoned with her exit. There is no remedy for death, only a limp eternity and her consuming loneliness which unfortunately didn't die with her when she took her life, it hitchhiked. As her body rots, her musings remind us that it is far better to be infected with life and all it's ills than to be silenced by one's own hands. Just one more suicide in a family that suffers, "Aunt Clara was the pretty sister, my mother the depressed one. The eldest sister was named Lidia but she had drowned in the Cassible River, taking all her adjectives with her."
"My name is Dorotea Giglio and I'm full of flies. However much civilization might have trained you to be frightened of people like me, no one's more scared than I am."
It is now four years after her death, and though she may watch life happening, she cannot touch it, nor feel it. Her heart no longer beats, her blood no longer thrums. She hasn't ascended to any form of heaven and life goes on blissfully unaware of her, as it will one day without us. We visit the past with her haunting recollections of her family pregnant with sorrows, an absent father, a little girl who never wants to grow up and who absorbs the contagion of depression her mother exhales. A strange child, one who is afraid of her savior Jesus once she starts attending church. A family of sleepwalkers and dreamers of nightmares, women who smile only on accident and with this knowledge who can wonder why she shook off her mortal coil? Sadness grew as her body grew, she feels she is her mother's parasite and the book is darker and darker still. When she finds love, it is with a cold man, Lorenzo. When she is dead, she wants to tell someone, him... but life moves on... life cannot hear her and all she has is evidence that he has new love, she is nothing but a dead girl in his past. As she says, "My name is an abandoned house."
This novel is macabre but somehow in all it's ghastly horror it is beautiful and tender. In fact, having meant to simply peruse my highlights for this review, I find myself once again plunging into her despair and reading the novel over. Reading tastes vary, we all know this- but this book isn't really one genre because it is darkly humorous at moments, overflowing with poisonous sorrow, and somehow it celebrates life while discarding it. It remains a personal favorite, and I think if Edgar Allan Poe had a daughter it could be the character Dorotea, or maybe this author. I have been waiting a few years for another novel by Viola Di Grado, as this one still festers inside of me. Nothing yet... I'm waiting here, collecting cobwebs!
I recommend this book, but not to just anyone. It's eclectic, it's beautiful in the way of skeleton trees and crumbling haunted houses. Her afterlife is one long terrible wait, as is how I feel waiting for another novel! "Waiting is one long meal, a cannibalism." Gorgeous novel, one I would be remiss not to share with readers with tastes as strange as my own.
Available Now
Europa Editions
Read
January 27, 2016Visceral descriptions of death and decomposition open Hollow Heart, narrated by the ghost of suicided Sicilian twenty-five year old, Dorotea. Later episodes of these morbidly virtuosic sentences, courageously daring to stare in the fate of the disintegrating, microorganism-filled buried body (probably the best meshing of the artistic and the biological I've seen since reading Cărtărescu) are what remain the book's strength between the less compelling stretches which likely reflect the flatness of chronically depressed Dorotea's worldview. Her descriptions of the emotional state of the dead, and of herself in death as no longer having feelings and becoming objective, are disconnected from - jar with - her ghost's loneliness, and violently strong expressions of emotion towards the living from which she seems to have no self-inhibition, even when she knows of clear warning examples. . This emotional unawareness and inarticulacy (am trying to use less psychology jargon now, but what I mean is basically a low degree of affect consciousness) could be seen as part of a case history (Dorotea never fully and overtly explains why she killed herself when she did); along with the chilling yet outwardly uneventful childhood moments after which she felt perpetually bleak - a type of memory that seems to be common among depressives even of less dark a stripe - and her aunt who, also in her twenties, had copied Virginia Woolf's means of demise. [Woolf is never mentioned by name, although Violet Trefusis, who died in Italy, is.]
Unfortunately I can't help thinking of stories with ghost main characters alongside examples from comedic or children's fantasy. Seeing everything through Dorotea's figurative eyes means there are gaps or inconsistencies in the worldbuilding, and, not quite entering into the spirit of the story [boom, boom] I was frustrated with this side of things in a nerdy, literal fashion. What, for instance, determines who's present as a ghost? Why does Dorotea meet so few other ghosts? Why is the pain of death or events leading up to it never described? What happens to people who are cremated? Why do the ghosts still need food and drink if it falls straight through them to the floor? How can they stamp on ants or type to look up YouTube, yet float through walls and people?
A clever device: desperate 'voicemail' messages hoping to meet up with primary school or hobby club classmates who never meant much to Dorotea in life, just because they were people of her own generation who'd already died - but the system for these was never fully set out.
For much of the book I wondered whether the ghosts weren't allowed to move many miles from their graves... because if you can sneak on to transport unseen and can manage without money or shelter, and feel no physical pain or discomfort, what's to stop you going to see anywhere and everywhere in the world? Or even out of it on a space shuttle for that matter? And given that there are more humans who've died than there are alive at this moment, surely you've got an even better chance of meeting people you get on with? Besides, one could find out the answers to all the mysteries of history if there were ghosts old enough to know.
Well, it turned out - towards the end - that the ghosts can go on holiday by plane. It's evidently a reflection of who Dorotea was that even in death she kept going to her shop assistant job (where the elderly boss, conveniently, can see her), and staying in her old house, rather than jetting off round the world. I'm obviously failing to fully accept the story and character on their own terms - by imagining having some Gaimanesque adventures and playing it more for laughs - hence the absence of rating.
Unfortunately I can't help thinking of stories with ghost main characters alongside examples from comedic or children's fantasy. Seeing everything through Dorotea's figurative eyes means there are gaps or inconsistencies in the worldbuilding, and, not quite entering into the spirit of the story [boom, boom] I was frustrated with this side of things in a nerdy, literal fashion. What, for instance, determines who's present as a ghost? Why does Dorotea meet so few other ghosts? Why is the pain of death or events leading up to it never described? What happens to people who are cremated? Why do the ghosts still need food and drink if it falls straight through them to the floor? How can they stamp on ants or type to look up YouTube, yet float through walls and people?
A clever device: desperate 'voicemail' messages hoping to meet up with primary school or hobby club classmates who never meant much to Dorotea in life, just because they were people of her own generation who'd already died - but the system for these was never fully set out.
For much of the book I wondered whether the ghosts weren't allowed to move many miles from their graves... because if you can sneak on to transport unseen and can manage without money or shelter, and feel no physical pain or discomfort, what's to stop you going to see anywhere and everywhere in the world? Or even out of it on a space shuttle for that matter? And given that there are more humans who've died than there are alive at this moment, surely you've got an even better chance of meeting people you get on with? Besides, one could find out the answers to all the mysteries of history if there were ghosts old enough to know.
Well, it turned out - towards the end - that the ghosts can go on holiday by plane. It's evidently a reflection of who Dorotea was that even in death she kept going to her shop assistant job (where the elderly boss, conveniently, can see her), and staying in her old house, rather than jetting off round the world. I'm obviously failing to fully accept the story and character on their own terms - by imagining having some Gaimanesque adventures and playing it more for laughs - hence the absence of rating.
June 14, 2015
I hope I never meet Viola Di Grado. Her latest novel, The Hollow Heart, has the authentic ring of autobiography. Pure imagination is incapable of inventing something this assured, this intense and vivid. It must be drawn from life.
And what a sick, doom-laden, psychotic life it is! The narrator, Dorotea Giglio, is a sensitive soul, quirky, morbid, self-obsessed and glum. But the most disconcerting thing about Dorothea is the fact that she is dead.
She is dead from the first sentence. She remains dead until the last.
You might wonder if there can be a plot in a novel when the main character, who is also the narrator, is dead throughout.
Well, let me assure you, this novel holds quite a few surprises. There is more than just a back story. Things happen to Dorotea after she dies.
First, things happen physically to her corpse. We are not spared the details. If you are squeamish you can skip the bits in italics but I don't recommend this. The close-up scrutiny of her putrefying corpse is intrinsic to Dorotea's story.
For although Dorotea has a scientific interest in bodily decay, she discovers there is more to death than this. There is spiritual change too. There is growth.
There is also an awful, chilling moment towards the end of the novel when you think something truly shocking and unforgivable is about to happen. I had my still pumping heart in my mouth.
I won't spoil one of the best moments in the novel by telling you more about it. Suffice to say that Dorotea likes to tease.
She is playful with language too. "I died of optimism," she laments. "I thought my suffering would end after I died."
Suffering is only part of the process. Through suffering comes revelation. After revelation, something else. I'm not sure what to call it. Perhaps you could call it redemption but that sounds inappropriately religious. The novel is too subversive to fit into the tradition of religious doctrine suggested by the themes of suffering, revelation and redemption. It is a meditation on death that becomes a celebration of life. It celebrates, above all, a life rooted in the senses and expressed in words. Life holds possibilities the dead can only envy.
Because of this, the dead need psychiatric help. Your help.
As a disembodied ghost, Dorotea loses the ability to read. She can see the words on the page but she can no longer decipher their meaning. She can, however, write, and in writing she hopes to be rescued -- rescued by you, the reader.
If that seems paradoxical, a greater paradox was that in reading her words I found myself rescued by Dorotea.
Yes, I think the word rescued is not too strong to describe what happened to me. It happened on a subconscious level. I didn't realise the connection at first. But towards the end of the novel, having put it away in my bag and finished with it for the morning, I received a text from a friend whose father had just died. I didn't know her father well but I suddenly had a strong conviction that I wanted to go to the funeral. Normally I avoid funerals. But this time I felt an irresistible compulsion to bond with my friend and pay respects to her father. What can I say? It was an epiphany. I felt different, very different inside.
It wasn't until the next day when I pulled The Hollow Heart out of my bag again and found where I'd left off, that I realised that Dorotea had changed my attitude to the dead.
I am not going to attempt to put this feeling into words. I cannot begin to come near Viola Di Grado's proficiency with language. I will just say that it was her words that brought about this change in me.
I no longer fear death. In fact I want to make friends with the dead. I long to embrace Dorotea as a sister.
Alas, I can't say the same about Viola Di Grado. A writer this powerful is scary. I really hope to God I never meet her.
And what a sick, doom-laden, psychotic life it is! The narrator, Dorotea Giglio, is a sensitive soul, quirky, morbid, self-obsessed and glum. But the most disconcerting thing about Dorothea is the fact that she is dead.
She is dead from the first sentence. She remains dead until the last.
You might wonder if there can be a plot in a novel when the main character, who is also the narrator, is dead throughout.
Well, let me assure you, this novel holds quite a few surprises. There is more than just a back story. Things happen to Dorotea after she dies.
First, things happen physically to her corpse. We are not spared the details. If you are squeamish you can skip the bits in italics but I don't recommend this. The close-up scrutiny of her putrefying corpse is intrinsic to Dorotea's story.
For although Dorotea has a scientific interest in bodily decay, she discovers there is more to death than this. There is spiritual change too. There is growth.
There is also an awful, chilling moment towards the end of the novel when you think something truly shocking and unforgivable is about to happen. I had my still pumping heart in my mouth.
I won't spoil one of the best moments in the novel by telling you more about it. Suffice to say that Dorotea likes to tease.
She is playful with language too. "I died of optimism," she laments. "I thought my suffering would end after I died."
Suffering is only part of the process. Through suffering comes revelation. After revelation, something else. I'm not sure what to call it. Perhaps you could call it redemption but that sounds inappropriately religious. The novel is too subversive to fit into the tradition of religious doctrine suggested by the themes of suffering, revelation and redemption. It is a meditation on death that becomes a celebration of life. It celebrates, above all, a life rooted in the senses and expressed in words. Life holds possibilities the dead can only envy.
Because of this, the dead need psychiatric help. Your help.
As a disembodied ghost, Dorotea loses the ability to read. She can see the words on the page but she can no longer decipher their meaning. She can, however, write, and in writing she hopes to be rescued -- rescued by you, the reader.
If that seems paradoxical, a greater paradox was that in reading her words I found myself rescued by Dorotea.
Yes, I think the word rescued is not too strong to describe what happened to me. It happened on a subconscious level. I didn't realise the connection at first. But towards the end of the novel, having put it away in my bag and finished with it for the morning, I received a text from a friend whose father had just died. I didn't know her father well but I suddenly had a strong conviction that I wanted to go to the funeral. Normally I avoid funerals. But this time I felt an irresistible compulsion to bond with my friend and pay respects to her father. What can I say? It was an epiphany. I felt different, very different inside.
It wasn't until the next day when I pulled The Hollow Heart out of my bag again and found where I'd left off, that I realised that Dorotea had changed my attitude to the dead.
I am not going to attempt to put this feeling into words. I cannot begin to come near Viola Di Grado's proficiency with language. I will just say that it was her words that brought about this change in me.
I no longer fear death. In fact I want to make friends with the dead. I long to embrace Dorotea as a sister.
Alas, I can't say the same about Viola Di Grado. A writer this powerful is scary. I really hope to God I never meet her.
November 10, 2016
Wow so this.....I wasn't sure what to expect, because even reading the insert you know it will be dark. And it was. The story of a 25-year-old woman who has suffered from depression her whole life, she decides to end it by committing suicide. Little does she know when she makes this decision is that killing herself will not eliminate herself from the world, but rather she will be forced to go on the rest of eternity as a "ghost", still surrounded by her old life and relations, the only difference is that no one can see her at all. So, yes, this was a very dark novel. Not only dark, but sad, haunting, reflective, and written in an extremely poetic way.
When she first is dead, you just get the impression that she's just there, not really making a difference in the lives of the ones she's around, but little by little it becomes apparent that, were this a film, we could see her unintentionally haunting others. It is spooky in a very real and very tragic way.
Recommended; is a very quick read, and will also get you to think about the meaning of life. the reason for our relationships with others, and the impacts we have even when we think there is nothing affected by us.
When she first is dead, you just get the impression that she's just there, not really making a difference in the lives of the ones she's around, but little by little it becomes apparent that, were this a film, we could see her unintentionally haunting others. It is spooky in a very real and very tragic way.
Recommended; is a very quick read, and will also get you to think about the meaning of life. the reason for our relationships with others, and the impacts we have even when we think there is nothing affected by us.
August 4, 2015
Cuore cavo
Viola di Grado
Cuore cavo è la storia cruda di una ragazza che muore suicida e va avanti narrando la sua storia da morta e raccontando il lento sfaldamento del suo corpo.
Andrò sicuramente contro corrente ma questo romanzo non mi è piaciuto, ho dato tre stelline solo perché lo trovo scritto veramente bene.
Mi ha annoiata e l’ho trovato ripetitivo in alcune sue parti.
Ha una prosa poetica, ma in questo libro non succede mai nulla o succedono sempre le stesse cose.
Pur essendo un romanzo duro ,forte, doloroso, non mi ha coinvolto, lasciandomi parecchie perplessità.
Viola di Grado
Cuore cavo è la storia cruda di una ragazza che muore suicida e va avanti narrando la sua storia da morta e raccontando il lento sfaldamento del suo corpo.
Andrò sicuramente contro corrente ma questo romanzo non mi è piaciuto, ho dato tre stelline solo perché lo trovo scritto veramente bene.
Mi ha annoiata e l’ho trovato ripetitivo in alcune sue parti.
Ha una prosa poetica, ma in questo libro non succede mai nulla o succedono sempre le stesse cose.
Pur essendo un romanzo duro ,forte, doloroso, non mi ha coinvolto, lasciandomi parecchie perplessità.
July 11, 2018
THERE ARE MINOR SPOILERS BELOW:
This book is like a poem on death. Viola Di Grado has blown me away by her writing. It's deep and requires you to absorb it slowly. It's definitely as melodic as it is gruesome (to some). It's definitely the first time I've seen a contrast between the emotions surrounding death (specifically, death by suicide) and the science of pathology or, decomposition of the body.
Review Continued Here
This book is like a poem on death. Viola Di Grado has blown me away by her writing. It's deep and requires you to absorb it slowly. It's definitely as melodic as it is gruesome (to some). It's definitely the first time I've seen a contrast between the emotions surrounding death (specifically, death by suicide) and the science of pathology or, decomposition of the body.
Review Continued Here
October 9, 2023
The only reason why I finished this novel is bc my poetry professor lent me her copy bc she thought id like it. To be honest I am offended that she thought I would. I read thru this book with a desperation to finish it as quickly as I possibly could. I was not fast enough.
I was reading some other reviews, trying to understand why people liked it, or why my prof does for that matter. I think people like how this book contains so much description and what the afterlife must be like. I thought the descriptions about the decomposition of her body were fine although she uses a lot of big words that only like science nerds would know. I saw reviews of people praising her ability to create such a strong sense of her imagined afterlife-- how I viewed it is that she is a fiction writer. To create an imaginary world/scene/characters etc is what the point of the genre is. That is what everyone in the genre does. She didn't do a bad job but it was definitely nothing impressive to me.
I have two main issues with this book. First, the author completely fails to establish a connection between the MC and the reader. The book opens stating that MC is dead. It then IMMEDIATELY launches into three whole pages of the second issue I have with this book (as discussed in my next paragraph). I am reading 174 pages about someone I could not care less about. She's all talking about her parents and Lorenzo and Alberto and I'm like... ok and??? The entire book is pointless if the reader is not interested in reading it 😭😭
My second issue is that her descriptions were simply not good. She spends entire pages at a time describing some aspect of the afterlife and uses maybe 20 different metaphors and similes per paragraph. She often uses multiple metaphors and similes per sentence, and they become run-ons and throw so many different ideas that she never elaborates upon at you so that you end up blankly staring at all these words that ultimately hold no meaning at all. Other times her descriptions are simply elementary level. I marked page 45 of her book, for example, because I genuinely could not believe that this page was not omitted. She is describing growing up in the physical sense:
"The clothes got smaller and the hair got longer. The shoes started to pinch the toes. Even the facial features grew. The diameter of the waist and the tip of the nose both grew."
??????????? Imagine reading an entire page of sentences like that. Can you believe it???? How could anyone not start to dissociate when looking at that?? This book is only 174 pages but maybe a fourth of it is full of shit like that. Maybe I should bump my rating down to one star. I can not believe this. I don't understand what is happening. I'm going to stop talking about this book, not only now but forever, because it is pissing me off. This review is prob not gonna make any sense bc I'm gonna post it without re reading it. I am NOT looking forward to discussing this with my prof
I was reading some other reviews, trying to understand why people liked it, or why my prof does for that matter. I think people like how this book contains so much description and what the afterlife must be like. I thought the descriptions about the decomposition of her body were fine although she uses a lot of big words that only like science nerds would know. I saw reviews of people praising her ability to create such a strong sense of her imagined afterlife-- how I viewed it is that she is a fiction writer. To create an imaginary world/scene/characters etc is what the point of the genre is. That is what everyone in the genre does. She didn't do a bad job but it was definitely nothing impressive to me.
I have two main issues with this book. First, the author completely fails to establish a connection between the MC and the reader. The book opens stating that MC is dead. It then IMMEDIATELY launches into three whole pages of the second issue I have with this book (as discussed in my next paragraph). I am reading 174 pages about someone I could not care less about. She's all talking about her parents and Lorenzo and Alberto and I'm like... ok and??? The entire book is pointless if the reader is not interested in reading it 😭😭
My second issue is that her descriptions were simply not good. She spends entire pages at a time describing some aspect of the afterlife and uses maybe 20 different metaphors and similes per paragraph. She often uses multiple metaphors and similes per sentence, and they become run-ons and throw so many different ideas that she never elaborates upon at you so that you end up blankly staring at all these words that ultimately hold no meaning at all. Other times her descriptions are simply elementary level. I marked page 45 of her book, for example, because I genuinely could not believe that this page was not omitted. She is describing growing up in the physical sense:
"The clothes got smaller and the hair got longer. The shoes started to pinch the toes. Even the facial features grew. The diameter of the waist and the tip of the nose both grew."
??????????? Imagine reading an entire page of sentences like that. Can you believe it???? How could anyone not start to dissociate when looking at that?? This book is only 174 pages but maybe a fourth of it is full of shit like that. Maybe I should bump my rating down to one star. I can not believe this. I don't understand what is happening. I'm going to stop talking about this book, not only now but forever, because it is pissing me off. This review is prob not gonna make any sense bc I'm gonna post it without re reading it. I am NOT looking forward to discussing this with my prof
August 8, 2015
Stancante. Banale. A tratti noioso a tratti ripetitivo. L'inno perfetto per una mente "emo-suicida", un'ode all'egocentrismo viziato dei figli unici che non ottengono quello che vogliono da una sola vita.
Tanto più da genitori divorziati.
Probabilmente è un'autobiografia vigliacca dell'autrice, un desiderio inconfessabile di un'anima "goth", per ora almeno, dove a qualunque scelta segue un pentimento struggente e nevrotico nel momento stesso che ci si rende conto che gli altri non reagiscono come vorremmo.
Ho tirato a stento fino alle ultime parole per il semplice desiderio -malato- e pieno di speranza che almeno alla fine avrebbe avuto un senso.
Ed invece...
Certi monologhi non andrebbero pubblicati su carta, ma lasciati disperdere tra le pagine di un blog in rete che cade nel dimenticatoio sotto pesanti Archivi di ripetizione.
Non consigliato. Tempo sprecato.
Tanto più da genitori divorziati.
Probabilmente è un'autobiografia vigliacca dell'autrice, un desiderio inconfessabile di un'anima "goth", per ora almeno, dove a qualunque scelta segue un pentimento struggente e nevrotico nel momento stesso che ci si rende conto che gli altri non reagiscono come vorremmo.
Ho tirato a stento fino alle ultime parole per il semplice desiderio -malato- e pieno di speranza che almeno alla fine avrebbe avuto un senso.
Ed invece...
Certi monologhi non andrebbero pubblicati su carta, ma lasciati disperdere tra le pagine di un blog in rete che cade nel dimenticatoio sotto pesanti Archivi di ripetizione.
Non consigliato. Tempo sprecato.
October 18, 2019
Di Grado's take on "life" after death holds fascination similar to the way her take on life is. A young woman narrates her life - both before and after death, with a clinical detachment to either form of life. She observes, obsesses over small things, struggles to communicate and watches her life pass as an observer rather than a participant.
Life and death juxtaposes in this little novel. If one were to open a random page and read, its quite hard to figure out if the author is talking about the narrators life before death or after.
Life and death juxtaposes in this little novel. If one were to open a random page and read, its quite hard to figure out if the author is talking about the narrators life before death or after.
June 11, 2014
Quanto Settanta acrilico trenta lana mi aveva affascinata, tanto Cuore cavo mi ha annoiata. Viola Di Grado sa sicuramente scrivere molto bene, ma in questo caso le sue ottime capacità non sono state sufficienti a sorreggere la struttura di un romanzo strano e particolare come il suo stile.
La storia si apre con il suicidio della protagonista, e va avanti a narrare la sua "vita" da morta, il lento e inesorabile sfaldamento del corpo, la sua anima che vaga senza pace. Il tema è adatto al linguaggio decadente e macabro che riesce così bene all'autrice, ma qualcosa non ha funzionato. Dopo poche pagine diventa ripetitivo, la putrefazione non riesce più ad affascinare, la drammaticità del non essere più nulla annoia. Insomma, sembra un mero esercizio di stile, un po' autocompiaciuto.
Leggerò sicuramente altro di questa autrice giovane e strana, ma con questo libro non ci siamo proprio.
La storia si apre con il suicidio della protagonista, e va avanti a narrare la sua "vita" da morta, il lento e inesorabile sfaldamento del corpo, la sua anima che vaga senza pace. Il tema è adatto al linguaggio decadente e macabro che riesce così bene all'autrice, ma qualcosa non ha funzionato. Dopo poche pagine diventa ripetitivo, la putrefazione non riesce più ad affascinare, la drammaticità del non essere più nulla annoia. Insomma, sembra un mero esercizio di stile, un po' autocompiaciuto.
Leggerò sicuramente altro di questa autrice giovane e strana, ma con questo libro non ci siamo proprio.
August 28, 2016
Just finished this incredible book. It is dark and beautiful. This book is a sad exploration of the afterlife of lonely Dorotea. It will move you, it will disgust you, it will break your heart. The writing is highly skilled even when deeply disturbing. This one will haunt me for a long time.
December 23, 2024
La prosa è pura poesia, e so che suona come un controsenso. Ma l'autrice gioca con le parole in un modo sopraffino. Certo, Cuore cavo è una storia che ti trascina giù, che parla di morte e solitudine e disperazione, ma che fa anche riflettere tanto. La mancanza di una vera e propria trama mi ha un po' infiacchito nella lettura, e sono andata avanti principalmente per gli spunti di ragionamento e per lo stile incredibile. Proverò di sicuro a leggere altro di Di Grado.
March 21, 2024
A really strong start for this one and I felt like I was pulling passages that I loved every other page such as:
"We used electricity only sparingly because we had so little money, and we used our faces to smile only sparingly because happiness wasn't something we did well."
and
"My grandmother was the skinniest one. Clara was the prettiest one. I was the palest. Lidia was the deadest one, though not always."
and
"When I turned seven she took me to church. She'd never been religious. Everything smelled like incense. The light was bruised and humiliated, the way it is in all churches."
and
"They moved among the guests, distributing cold antipasti and even colder smiles."
But it started to lose it's luster for me around the middle of the book. Not enough to stop me reading, but enough to bring down a couple of stars.
Translations fascinate me, I never know if these passages would have same effect on me in the original as they do in translation
"We used electricity only sparingly because we had so little money, and we used our faces to smile only sparingly because happiness wasn't something we did well."
and
"My grandmother was the skinniest one. Clara was the prettiest one. I was the palest. Lidia was the deadest one, though not always."
and
"When I turned seven she took me to church. She'd never been religious. Everything smelled like incense. The light was bruised and humiliated, the way it is in all churches."
and
"They moved among the guests, distributing cold antipasti and even colder smiles."
But it started to lose it's luster for me around the middle of the book. Not enough to stop me reading, but enough to bring down a couple of stars.
Translations fascinate me, I never know if these passages would have same effect on me in the original as they do in translation
May 14, 2018
Got about halfway through before losing patience. Maybe I would have liked this more when I was young and angsty and really interested in suicide. But I just kept thinking... What a waste of a death! Like, if I was in this world where I could walk around invisibly, untied to my body I think at first at least I would be like.. Fuck it I'm climbing everest! I'm going to the bottom of the ocean! I'm going to find a living person with decent taste in Netflix. So much opportunity and you're going to count the bugs in your corpse and go to your boring job and watch your mother have sex? Sorry but nah.
January 25, 2024
interesting concept and the stuff about decomposition were interestingly written but if you’ve read any book that comes out in the last 10 years about a depressed white girl you’ve basically already read this
the main character doesn’t stand out at all, mommy issues, daddy issues, older boyfriend problems, educated but listless, it’s all more of the same
the main character doesn’t stand out at all, mommy issues, daddy issues, older boyfriend problems, educated but listless, it’s all more of the same
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 18, 2025
Viola Di Grado, con il suo romanzo Cuore cavo, pubblicato per la prima volta nel 2013, e adesso ripubblicato dalla casa editrice La nave di Teseo, sfonda violentemente le pareti sottili della letteratura convenzionale e tradizionale sulla morte, immergendoci in un abisso lirico e perturbante che esplora con disarmante crudezza e struggente delicatezza il su1cidio e la vita che, stranamente e dolorosamente, prosegue oltre l'ultimo battito.
Un libro, che tanti anni fa, ormai, appariva come una catastrofe fisica ed emotiva, che squarciava il velo della tolleranza emozionale, e che raccontava con raccapricciante verità, una visione oltre la morte che nessuno si sarebbe mai aspettato.
Questo romanzo, così profondamente cupo e intenso, obbliga chi lo legge a guardare in faccia l'invisibile, ciò che la società vuole celare, ciò che nessuno osa mai guardare davvero fino in fondo. Cuore cavo è un'opera che batte al ritmo disturbato e intimo di un cuore vulnerabile e spezzato, che ci attraversa con ferocia e tenerezza, costringendoci a confrontarci con le nostre ombre più profonde.
Lo stile narrativo di Viola Di Grado è di una bellezza feroce, poeticamente brutale. La sua prosa oscilla tra un lirismo sublime e una descrizione quasi clinica, generando un effetto disorientante ma ipnotico.La scrittura è quindi, oltre che letterariamente unica, un atto di sovversione filosofica, una sfida al lettore a confrontarsi con i propri tabù, paure e con l’inevitabile crudeltà del mondo.
L’autrice ci fa dono di una cicatrice dolceamara che sussurra verità scomode e bellissime, lasciandoci interdetti di fronte al sentimento imperfetto che ci nasce dentro, a metà tra l'attrazione e la paura che solo il sublime romantico – come sosteneva Burke – riesce a trasmettere: "l'orrendo che affascina."
Recensione completa sul blog.
Un libro, che tanti anni fa, ormai, appariva come una catastrofe fisica ed emotiva, che squarciava il velo della tolleranza emozionale, e che raccontava con raccapricciante verità, una visione oltre la morte che nessuno si sarebbe mai aspettato.
Questo romanzo, così profondamente cupo e intenso, obbliga chi lo legge a guardare in faccia l'invisibile, ciò che la società vuole celare, ciò che nessuno osa mai guardare davvero fino in fondo. Cuore cavo è un'opera che batte al ritmo disturbato e intimo di un cuore vulnerabile e spezzato, che ci attraversa con ferocia e tenerezza, costringendoci a confrontarci con le nostre ombre più profonde.
Lo stile narrativo di Viola Di Grado è di una bellezza feroce, poeticamente brutale. La sua prosa oscilla tra un lirismo sublime e una descrizione quasi clinica, generando un effetto disorientante ma ipnotico.La scrittura è quindi, oltre che letterariamente unica, un atto di sovversione filosofica, una sfida al lettore a confrontarsi con i propri tabù, paure e con l’inevitabile crudeltà del mondo.
L’autrice ci fa dono di una cicatrice dolceamara che sussurra verità scomode e bellissime, lasciandoci interdetti di fronte al sentimento imperfetto che ci nasce dentro, a metà tra l'attrazione e la paura che solo il sublime romantico – come sosteneva Burke – riesce a trasmettere: "l'orrendo che affascina."
Recensione completa sul blog.
May 11, 2022
If you’ve ever wondered, What would the world be like after my death — and really, don’t all moody readers indulge in this fantasy now and then — meet Dorotea, the narrator of award-winning Italian writer Viola’s novel. At the start of the story, Dorotea’s already dead of suicide, having slit her writsts at the tender age of twenty-five after a brief, depressing life of the usual variety: missing father, depressed and alcoholic mother, disappointing lovers —
Is this mini book review getting too dark? Well, this book is dark. Reading it will envelop you with the numb, dissociative sensations of a heavy depression, from the rote indifference of joyless days accumulating into years to the hollow yet familiar numbness that comes after a particularly painful rejection.
Strangely, Dorotea’s experiences don’t end with her death. Her consciousness stays around, watching her own body decompose, creeping on a cute guy at the bookstore, spying on her mother while she fucks new boyfriends. The prose is hypnotic and gruesome and voyeuristic, floating in that dangerous liminal space between futile hope and hopelessness. Pick up this book for a literary version of Dead Like Me that’s more bleak yet more imaginative, more fanciful yet more real.
Is this mini book review getting too dark? Well, this book is dark. Reading it will envelop you with the numb, dissociative sensations of a heavy depression, from the rote indifference of joyless days accumulating into years to the hollow yet familiar numbness that comes after a particularly painful rejection.
Strangely, Dorotea’s experiences don’t end with her death. Her consciousness stays around, watching her own body decompose, creeping on a cute guy at the bookstore, spying on her mother while she fucks new boyfriends. The prose is hypnotic and gruesome and voyeuristic, floating in that dangerous liminal space between futile hope and hopelessness. Pick up this book for a literary version of Dead Like Me that’s more bleak yet more imaginative, more fanciful yet more real.
August 18, 2022
“My name is Dorotea Giglio and I’m full of flies. However much civilization might have trained you to be frightened of people like me, no one’s more scared than I am.”
Beautifully rendered and translated by Antony Shugaar, this dark melodic novel explores the afterlife of a woman who has passed on to the other side of the veil. We briefly see the whys and wherefores of how Dorotea ended up at this point but in the end, not of utmost importance.
“No, I didn’t die of love. I really wish I had: I’d be carrying on the legacy of literary figures like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary. Instead, you recover from love.”
Loss, grief, depression, su*c*de. All heavy topics. Yet the prose is so incisive, so distinctive. Di Grado’s writing is like tea that needs to steep - if you drink it too soon you miss the undertones and the richness, if you let it steep too long you’ll put it to the side and let it wallow untouched on a DNF shelf.
I very much enjoyed this journey and exploration but it may not be for everyone so please check content and trigger warnings (Di Grado intimately explores the decomposition of the body through Dorotea’s lingering spirit, for example). But should you decide to, it really is such beautiful and tender writing of a macabre subject that we rarely speak of.
Beautifully rendered and translated by Antony Shugaar, this dark melodic novel explores the afterlife of a woman who has passed on to the other side of the veil. We briefly see the whys and wherefores of how Dorotea ended up at this point but in the end, not of utmost importance.
“No, I didn’t die of love. I really wish I had: I’d be carrying on the legacy of literary figures like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary. Instead, you recover from love.”
Loss, grief, depression, su*c*de. All heavy topics. Yet the prose is so incisive, so distinctive. Di Grado’s writing is like tea that needs to steep - if you drink it too soon you miss the undertones and the richness, if you let it steep too long you’ll put it to the side and let it wallow untouched on a DNF shelf.
I very much enjoyed this journey and exploration but it may not be for everyone so please check content and trigger warnings (Di Grado intimately explores the decomposition of the body through Dorotea’s lingering spirit, for example). But should you decide to, it really is such beautiful and tender writing of a macabre subject that we rarely speak of.
November 18, 2017
Dopo un esordio che mi aveva molto favorevolmente impressionato Viola Di Grado qui mi sconcerta di fronte a un romanzo che sono più volte stato tentato ad abbandonare in corso di lettura.
Una ragazza suicida il cui fantasma continua a vivere una vita umana, osserva registrandolo in un diario il lento decomporsi del suo corpo sottoterra, ma si intromette fantasmaticamente nelle vite dei sui familiari, ex-fidanzati, nuovi amori impossibili e anime di altri defunti. Ci narra comunque , ma faticosamente, di una storia vissuta da viva e che continua a vivere da morta.
C’è una pesante ricerca di stile, che oscilla tra un lirismo tragico e un gotico flamboyant che a volte sfocia in un comico-grottesco, talvolta interrompendo improvvisamente il climax creato. Il tutto sembra utilizzato per esercizio o, peggio, per puro autocompiacimento .
Un libro molto ambizioso, ma che risulta alla fine noioso, in diversi tratti sinceramente indigesto.
Una ragazza suicida il cui fantasma continua a vivere una vita umana, osserva registrandolo in un diario il lento decomporsi del suo corpo sottoterra, ma si intromette fantasmaticamente nelle vite dei sui familiari, ex-fidanzati, nuovi amori impossibili e anime di altri defunti. Ci narra comunque , ma faticosamente, di una storia vissuta da viva e che continua a vivere da morta.
C’è una pesante ricerca di stile, che oscilla tra un lirismo tragico e un gotico flamboyant che a volte sfocia in un comico-grottesco, talvolta interrompendo improvvisamente il climax creato. Il tutto sembra utilizzato per esercizio o, peggio, per puro autocompiacimento .
Un libro molto ambizioso, ma che risulta alla fine noioso, in diversi tratti sinceramente indigesto.
November 17, 2020
"In July of 2011 I'd never been so close to myself: I too, like all the thousands of billions of cells that died every day inside me, suddenly no longer found around myself the conditions necessary to forestall my own suicide."
A young woman recounts her suicide and the years following it she spends as a ghost. This book blew me away. Rarely does an author write so vividly and honestly about death, decomposition, and the thereafter. Di Grado goes into great detail about what happens to the human body after we die; but she spends even greater lengths describing what death does to the dead: how they feel about it, their relationship to the living. She relies heavily on metaphors and similes, but in new intriguing ways (perhaps because she is Italian and therefore these terms are unfamiliar to western ears). Her turns of phrase and word-play are a macabre delight. She is the gothic child of Ali Smith and Deborah Levy. A beautiful, grotesque story of pain, grief, desire, and life.
A young woman recounts her suicide and the years following it she spends as a ghost. This book blew me away. Rarely does an author write so vividly and honestly about death, decomposition, and the thereafter. Di Grado goes into great detail about what happens to the human body after we die; but she spends even greater lengths describing what death does to the dead: how they feel about it, their relationship to the living. She relies heavily on metaphors and similes, but in new intriguing ways (perhaps because she is Italian and therefore these terms are unfamiliar to western ears). Her turns of phrase and word-play are a macabre delight. She is the gothic child of Ali Smith and Deborah Levy. A beautiful, grotesque story of pain, grief, desire, and life.
August 8, 2023
this book was heavy in a way i was not expecting it to be. though i found it a little flat in places, and my interest in the text wavered consistently throughout (though this is largely due to my own preference of keeping texts of such topics away from the supernatural), i still found this to be an interesting read. some of the prose was pretty and stuck with me, and i enjoyed following dorotea and her emotional turbulence following her death and the subsequent decay of both her body and her presence in the world.
part of me feels like this should have been a series of poetry more than a short(ish) story. the eb and flow of prose, emotion and symbolism grows repetitive in parts, especially towards the end, and i'd have forgiven it more if the text were poetry on the hollowness of death instead.
part of me feels like this should have been a series of poetry more than a short(ish) story. the eb and flow of prose, emotion and symbolism grows repetitive in parts, especially towards the end, and i'd have forgiven it more if the text were poetry on the hollowness of death instead.
March 7, 2019
Avevo molte aspettative verso quest'opera perchè avevo letto molte recensioni entusiastiche. Secondo me Viola di Grado ha indubbiamente talento, capacità affabulatorie notevoli e sapiente uso della metafora ma queste qualità le ho trovate fredde esibizioni di bravura, una sorta di "posa" autoreferenziale. Sarà stata la giovane età? non so. Mi sono annoiata e ho sbuffato parecchio durante la lettura ecco perchè ho dato una valutazione così bassa. Comunque leggerò volentieri il suo prosimo romanzo che uscirà nel marzo 2019
January 16, 2025
The originality is startling and so strong that it can actually influence your view on the afterlife. But the novel seemed like a sketch and important lines were never fully developed. The character of Lydia, for example, could have used more development before her resurfacing in the novel. It didn��t bother me that we were not elucidated as to what happened with her father, but I would have liked to know about her own struggles before committing suicide. Her powers beyond the grave seemed inconsistent. It was clearly written by a developing writer but a very talented one.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 9, 2025
i particularly enjoyed the devastating mother-daughter dynamics woven through her death. the main character sees herself as both her mother’s illness—growing too much, likening her existence to the unchecked spread of cancerous cells—and her cure, with goodnight kisses meant to purge the poison, sacrificing herself for the caregiver’s sake. it’s one of the most honest depictions i’ve seen of how depression corrodes familial relationships when left untended. i was captivated by the visceral portrayal of physical decay after death, the clashing religious imagery—a hauntingly beautiful book.
January 30, 2023
I had to read this after finishing the forthcoming Blue Hunger, which frankly left me wanting. This reconfirmed my feeling that the author is quite brilliant. While perhaps not quite as amazing as Di Grado’s debut. (70% Acrylic 30% Wool) I found this to be quite wonderful. I really wondered how long she could hold my interest based on this premise, but it was quite compelling and wonderfully heartbreaking.
August 4, 2023
In pochi secondi non c'era più nulla attorno a me, perché tutto era dentro, tutto era insieme. Eravamo lì. Ferme e intere fino alla morsa delle ossa, imbevute di sangue, intatte fino al cuore. Sorridevo a Lidia, anche se non potevo vederla. Il corpo di Greta ci racchiudeva entrambe.
Si spalancarono gli occhi. Sul viso quelli di mia madre come fiori dalla roccia. Dentro, nel buio, gli altri quattro. (p. 164)
Si spalancarono gli occhi. Sul viso quelli di mia madre come fiori dalla roccia. Dentro, nel buio, gli altri quattro. (p. 164)
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