From this book it can be said that it is built like a thriller at all levels. The tension of fear is something that floods everything, from the perspective of the character of Elia, who recounts the fragments of her life in her hard sixteen years, to the perspective of the reader who is soon subjected to doubt and intrigue, to the chill of what may or may not have happened.
Can you hear me? As the title of this novel, I understand it as a call from Elia, the adolescent boy to his father. But it is a question that extends to the current voice of Elia, the one that tells us the story many years later.
Elia wants her father to answer it. Thus being able to establish a first attempt at conversation. The adolescent Elia would tell his father about his emotions, his feelings, his intuitions or omens that he, his father, is stubborn on a dark path to perdition.
Because what happens in Ponte, the town where the story is told, or rather what happened if we take into account the voice of the protagonist who speaks to us from today, seems to us to be a terrifying bitterness, with the iron aftertaste of the death around the town, around the father and flying over the young Elia.
And despite everything there is also room for love. After all, Elia is at the age of beginning to feel love as something very distant from her family, as a galloping feeling that seeks such warmth, satisfaction and understanding. Her, Elia's first great love is Anna Trabuio, a woman with more than a full adolescence away.
A disoriented father capable of everything on his journey to hell, a mother who neither feels nor suffers, an impossible love and a girl who ends up disappearing.
All shadows of a past that Elia presents us now, with the slightest advantage over the years. And what we discover delves into that sensation of the thriller, of Elia's life as a total thriller, of love as the only space to indulge in a transitory, fleeting happiness ...
Visiting Elia's past is a journey to an abandoned setting, walled up by memories and by the walls of the necessary defenses over what happened. But on this occasion, and after confessing, Elia is willing to jump over the wall with us, so that we can see that space of time sustained in fear by what happened.
You can now buy the novel Can you hear me?, the new book of Elena Varvello, here: