Maria Aspetta Marie by Madeleine Bourdouxhe

 Maria Aspetta Marie

by Madeleine Bourdouxhe attracted me since the first time I spotted it in my magazine book club and I recently bought it. 

I read it in few hours although this reading is pretty absorbing and the characters portrayed by Madeleine pretty complicated. Life is not simple and each of us bring a past, and a present in grade of influence the existence. It's the case of Marie, a strong lady of 30 years, passionate wife of Jean, with which she lives beautiful moments. Their friends are creatives; Marie is devoted; devoted to her existence, her husband, her ideal of life although once married with Jean something is like...changed. She thinks that this fusion of bodies and characters and life together has deleted her old self starting to live with a lot of anxiety her  internal, emotional existence. 

Oh; you won't apparently notice anything of this change. Jean, for example doesn't imagine that his wife would want to experience a best existence, something more exciting and spicey. He just sees, because the projection of Marie is this one, a devoted wife, and girl.

One day during a vacation Marie spots a young boy. He is just 19 years. They won't never enter in confidence; she won't never ask him anything: his dreams, his passions; nothing. They just will go to bed together.

Oh: Marie does live this asimmetry of her internal existence pretty well. She is in love with her husband, but she also dream sometimes some escapism. 

Claude is her sister, and Claude is another chapter pretty sad of the story because she will try to kill herself;  the thematic of suicide is typical of this writer; why doing that she asks Marie when she learns that her sister tried to kill herself? It's an act of egoism; we represent life, why then this desire of sleeping for not feeling anything, for not living anything? asks to herself worried while she is assisting her sister.

I found fascinating the discovery and re-discovery of Paris; Marie, when her husband is somewhere else for work walks, lost in her thoughts reaching the most beautiful corners of the french capital, eating, drinking and smoking all alone in several cafés per hours, watching people sat close to her, imagining their destinies or just thinking, while she is defining herself and the reality where she lives into.

Marie, reserved and disinibited, closed and opened; free spiritually and physical, conscious of her being and her potentialities, she is a real portrait of a great feminist, without the pretence, after all, of being a feminist, but just the desire of living and not dying emotionally, imprisoned in the common existence of the everyday life.

Beautiful!

Highly recommended.

Anna Maria Polidori