“Ogni angelo è tremendo” by Susanna Tamaro.
Susanna Tamaro is among the most famous and best-selling of the new generation of Italian writers of the last few decades, along with Alessandro D’avenia, Paolo Giordano, and Roberto Saviano. She became an internationally well-known novelist with the top-selling story “Follow Your Heart”, which sold millions of copies only in Italy and was translated into more than 20 languages.
“Ogni angelo è tremendo”, regrettably not yet available in English, is a gripping, magnificent, well-written “sort of” autobiography, in which Tamaro has depicted wittingly not only the crucial moments of her life but also the course she has endured to become a writer. As she said in a YouTube interview, she didn’t intend this book to expose directly her own biography but to show how the process one has to overcome to succeed as a novelist. In my opinion, this work is her more mature, overachieved writing because of her gracious prose intertwined with her childhood and adolescent anecdotes, which puts the reader in her skin and makes him or her empathize with her moving, touching life story.
Tamaro’s work aims from the beginning to transport the reader to Trieste, her homeland, where she was born and grew up, and without which the public can’t grasp the whole dimension of the experience she bore in his infancy and puberty. The author has an astonishing ability to describe in detail the ambiance of the city as well as the peculiar geography where it’s situated, which marked her character and influenced the way of living of her own family. A “dysfunctional” group of people that she and his brother had to suffer and manage to deal with. However, this painful experience, which becomes radical at the end of Susanna’s adolescence, it’s the material that she beautifully transforms in the plot that leads us to her profession. From here and forward the book reflects on the issues of being a successful writer, and how she picked up the different characters that give colour to their novels. It’s startling how she speaks about some people that have left an indelible trait on her personality, such as her anarchic, world-weary but caring father; her rigid but wise grandparents, that were Jewish; or an elderly woman, a friend of her grandmother, that survives the Holocaust and, nevertheless, is plenty of joy and thankfulness to life.
The book is effective and it holds your attention from the start. Once I commenced it, I couldn’t stop reading it as I was fully engaged by the exciting narrative of the, sometimes, bizarre events that compound the parts of her puzzled life. You can’t avoid feeling sympathetic with the dramatic episodes of her story and at the same time, you enjoy until your tears how she managed to tackle her problems all alone. Anyway, something I completely take pleasure from in this book was her hope and, from time to time, the depth she goes into the psychological complexity of the human condition. Without being a philosopher she’s well aware of what is being human, being a woman, and being a writer that has a profound message to share with the public. You can’t read Tamaro and remain untouched by its reflection upon existence, pain, absurdity, the nature or the sea, religion, solitude, madness, and so forth.
In summary, I’d effusively recommend “Ogni angelo è tremendo”, as an unavoidable text to understand the author and her success. You’ll be rewarded by her riveting writing but, above all, by her enchanting story of life, in which she ponders smartly how every lifetime is worth living despite the inherent hurdles of being human.
