Lead Review (The Little I Knew)

• Book: The Little I Knew
• Location: Scauri
• Author: Ailsa Wood (Translator), Chiara Valerio

Review Author: tripfiction

3.5*

The setting for this novel is Scauri, a coastal town in Lazio, between Rome and Naples. Chiara Valerio has set her story in a place that she herself knows well and therefore the sense of place feels very authentic and very “Italian”.

The story is told through Lea’s perspective. She is a woman who has come back to her home town to raise her family, and she is busy juggling home life and her determination to work. She has trained in law. The death of Vittoria – found dead in her bathtub – touches her deeply. Vittoria was a woman who had eccentric proclivities, a herbalist, who lived with a woman, who was considerably younger than herself. Many a tongue had been set wagging by this woman’s behaviour given the story is set in the later 20th Century.

Lea is clear that she needs to understand the circumstances surrounding Vittoria’s death and sets about trying to talk to locals in the hope of tying up some evident loose ends and understand various connections Vittoria had forged over her time in Scauri; furthermore, Lea consciously starts to think about how she herself felt about Vittoria.

Once I became familiar with the writing and translation style – it was a little hard to get into early on – I enjoyed reading this novel of Italian, small town dynamics. The descriptions are rich and evocative. The prose can be a little wooden at times and whether that is in the original or an issue with translation I do not know. This is one for fans of Elena Ferrante’s work. This novel has been a best seller in Italy and was shortlisted for the Premio Strega.

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