Gabriella Zalapì: Ilaria or the Conquest of Disobedience
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novel
On a day in May 1980, eight-year-old Ilaria gets into her father's car after school. From small hotels to highway areas, the wandering in northern Italy continues. Thinking of her mother, the child promises herself not to cry anymore. She learns to drive and lie, discovers Trieste, Bologna, boarding school in Rome, and a peasant and sunny life in Sicily. Thanks to games, singing hits at the top of her voice in the car, thanks to Claudia, Isabella, or Vito, the abduction resembles an almost normal childhood. But the father drinks too much; he is a "nervous cheetah" in a nicotine cloud, the little one thinks. If he takes her by the hand, it is better not to withdraw it; nor move her face back when he pinches her cheek. Ilaria observes and feels everything. In striking, rapid, and precise language, this novel tells from the inside the collapse of a little girl who must accomplish the learning of life alone.
Good to know
Launched in 2012, the Prix du Roman des étudiants France Culture annually rewards a novel written in French, from the September literary season. Previous winners include Maylis de Kerangal, Gaël Faye, Lola Lafon, Emma Becker, Pauline Delabroy-Allard, Léonor de Récondo, Olivier Bourdeaut, or Eric Reinhardt, and Gabriella Zalapì for 2024. Gabriella Zalapì is a visual artist of English, Italian, and Swiss origin, living in Paris. Trained at the Geneva School of Art and Design, she draws, among other things, her material from her own family history, reusing photographs, archives, memories and arranging them in a troubling play between history and fiction. Antonia (Zoé, 2019, Le livre de poche, 2020), her first novel, received the Grand Prix de l’héroïne Madame Figaro and the Bibliomedia prize. In Willibald, Gabriella Zalapì's precise and minimal writing depicts the folds and pleats of a man whose life, as tragic as it is novelistic, made his family a collateral victim. Knowing that Italy will be the guest country of the 2025 edition of Livre sur la place, moderation will be ensured by Sarah Polacci, general commissioner of the Livre sur la Place, host, and reporter at Radio France.
Automatically translated from French.
Where does it take place?
Institut Pierre Werner
Centre Culturel de Rencontre Abbaye de Neumünster
28 Rue Münster
2160 Grund Luxembourg
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