Originally published in Italy as Niente di Vero, or “Nothing True”, Veronica Raimo’s autofictional fourth novel comes garlanded with praise and prizes. The story of a young woman growing up in Rome in a dysfunctional family who goes on to become a writer, it’s cruder and more slippery than Fleabag, funnier but less insightful than Deborah Levy’s “living autobiographies”, and ultimately frustrating for the way in which its author, for all her startling candour, somehow eludes our gaze.
We first meet not Veronica, but her parents, via their neuroses: a mother whose clear favourite is her son Christian (Raimo does have a brother called Christian, also a writer) and who requires near-constant telephone contact with both her children; a father who subdivides their tiny apartment in Rome by throwing up more and more internal walls and whose obsession with germs leads him to wipe everything down with alcohol – including his kids. The voice of the novel’s narrator – known as Verika, Vero, Oca, Scarafona, Smilzi and a host of other names – is wry and detached, often knowingly droll, as though she is sitting at a bar and telling you her story in disarranged fragments, each one polished to become a “bit”. We follow as she jumps about in time through a childhood marked by constipation, flashers, parental anxiety and shared boredom, and on into an adolescence in which subterfuge of various kinds becomes a necessary form of psychological escape. We learn that as an adult, she is a child-free writer and translator who has spent a lot of time in Berlin, as Raimo has, and are given glimpses – largely absurdist, but occasionally poignant – of heartbreak, an abortion and her father’s death.
The extent to which these experiences are “true” is perhaps the book’s real subject, something its Italian title alludes to: Verika’s first creative success is an act of appropriation, and as an adult she describes how she and her brother Christian routinely complete one another’s work. At school she provokes a crisis among the teaching staff for saying something she swears she didn’t actually say; and she creates an entirely made-up diary for the sole benefit of her mother, who she knows will read it – perhaps just as she is doing here. In other words, we are warned not to believe her; and yet it’s very hard not to.
Although happy to polish anecdotes in the service of humour, Raimo deliberately resists the way in which memory shapes events to give them a significance they didn’t have at the time. For example, Lost on Me’s narrator is unclear about when she first had sex: “I didn’t feel what I should’ve felt because I didn’t know what it was I should’ve been feeling … to me, every experience needs a precise linguistic or empirical explanation … otherwise I’m oblivious to the fact that I’m experiencing it,” she states – a fascinating and revealing insight. When her father is dying, she says goodbye to him well before she has to and, in fact, tells an acquaintance on the street that he’s dead long before he is even taken ill; in this way the moment of ultimate significance is diffused. In one aside to the reader, she notes that “sometimes we write not to process grief, but to make it up” – yet her description of wanting to call her father when she turned 40, the age he was when she first had distinct memories of him, has the distinct, and moving, ring of truth.
Yet elsewhere, Raimo herself eludes us – perhaps on purpose, given that her narrator describes how, as an adult, people often seem not to recognise her, as though she cannot clearly be seen. While links can be postulated between the formative experiences of the little girl and the glimpses we’re given of the adult narrator, somehow they don’t quite add up to a plausible whole. It’s possible that some of this is an effect of reading the book in translation: Leah Janeczko lends the text an American flavour (“sneakers”, “screwing”, “chick”) that feels distancing to British ears when combined with its European locations and descriptions of Italian family life. More importantly, while the humour comes through brilliantly there’s a slight instability in terms of voice that makes it hard to connect with the interior life of the adult woman, something that was surely not present in the original Italian. It feels like looking at an unfamiliar view through the sheerest of voile curtains: everything is there, yet it’s somehow hard to fully embrace.
But perhaps this is all part of a deliberate game Raimo is playing – and Lost on Me does feel like a gleeful autofictional tarantella danced by truth and fiction, authenticity and disguise. Still, it feels somehow unsatisfying that Raimo seems almost always to be turned away from us: a silhouette slipping quietly out of the side door of a theatre even as her narrator holds court on stage.
• Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo, translated by Leah Janeczko, is published by Virago (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
