IF YOU have not already heard of Va'Dove Ti Porta Il Cuore (Go Where The Heart Takes You), Italy's international bestselling novel by the Trieste based writer Susanna Tamaro, you probably soon will.
An Italian international bestseller is not a common occurrence. In the post war period, perhaps only Umberto Eco's novel In The Name of The Rose managed to earn that status. Yet, the signs and sales suggest that Va'Dove Ti Porta Il Cuore could become as big an international success. In less than two years since publication in 1994, it has already sold more than one million copies in 24 countries outside Italy.
For the literary critics, it may be an interesting exercise to wonder why it is a "bestseller" in countries as different as South Africa, Greece, Spain, Australia and Portugal. For your correspondent, it is even more intriguing to reflect on possible explanations for its success in its native Italy.
For if the book has proved successful internationally, it has been a mega success at home. Sales of 30,000 are usually enough to top the bestseller charts in Italy. Yet, notwithstanding a hostile reception from the Italian literary establishment, Va'Dove Ti Porta Il Cuore has sold two million copies in Italy. The film of the book has already been made and is due in our cinemas shortly. Ms Tamaro will be able to pay her rent for the foreseeable future.
Written in a letter form, Va'Dove Ti Porta Il Cuore probably does for the modern Italian novel what Love Story did for American cinema. It is simple, sentimental and slightly mystical.
For example, the final lines of the book include "Look after yourself. And, as you grow up, every time that you want to set to right things that are wrong, remember that the first revolution is the one inside yourself, the first and most important. To fight for an idea without having any self knowledge is one of the most dangerous things that you can do."
The protagonist and letter writer is a grandmother. She is writing to her granddaughter far away at study in America, where she has apparently gone after becoming fed up with life at home with grandmother. She had lived at home with grandmother Olga, after her mother, Ilaria, had died in a car accident when she was a small baby.
Recalling the night of the accident, grandma writes to granddaughter "Where's Mamma?" you asked me during dinner. "Mamma's gone, she's gone on a long journey up into the sky". With your great blond curls, you kept on eating in silence. Then as soon as you had finished, in a very serious voice you asked me, "Grandma, can we go and say hello to her." "Of course, love," I replied and taking you up in my arms, I carried you out into the garden. We stood there for a long time on the lawn with you waving your little hand and saying, "Ciao, Ciao" to the stars"
Why should such sentiments prompt sales of two million in a country with low per capita sales of books and newspapers at least by the standards of developed societies? Luca Lando, of the firm Baldini & Castoldi, the book's publishers, suggests that the book has four things going for it it is a "good story", it is simple, it has a title which is also a concept, and people buy it because they want to make a present of that concept to friends and loved ones.
That could all be. To my mind Italians have bought it because they see it as a form of respectable escapism. Va'Dove Ti Porta Il Cuore manages to write about three generations of Italian living since 1917 without reference to the following Mafia, corruption, bribery, traffic jams, political chicanery, Mussolini, fascism, the Red Brigades, Fiat, Andreotti, Berlusconi, etc, etc. And a good job, too, you might say.
In short, the book manages to write about Italy without reminding Italians of many of the daily horrors of Italian living, past and present. It also embarks on the kind of undergraduate voyage of intellectual discovery that young Anglo Saxons embarked on 30 years ago but which has been denied Italians by, among other things, their innate conformism and by the family and church oriented nature (until recently) of social structures.
Interestingly, Va'Dove Ti Porta Il Cuore features not a single "normal" family unit. Grandmother's child Ilaria is illegitimate, having been fathered not by grandmother's husband but by her lover. Ilaria herself goes to Turkey one summer and comes back pregnant. She brings up her child as a single mother, with the identity of her child's father never revealed. Finally, the orphaned grandchild is brought up by grandmother. A happy family, indeed.
Perhaps, therein lies the secret of the book's success, at least in an Italy where the traditional certainties of the Catholic faith and family structures have given way to cynical materialism and social uncertainty. Maybe, too, that explains some of its success elsewhere.