The history of Apollonia was a mixture of shadows and phantoms: but, for different reasons, this one is also the tale of two lost and suffering souls: the one of a girl abandoned by her mother and the one of a lady mentally sick.
The new book by Leonor De Recondo
Revenir à Toi, published in the rentrée Litteraire by Grasset treats a thematic of big sufferance: the voluntary disappearance of a mother. I have choosen this book because some friends experienced this hell when little ones.
It happens: it happens that from a day to another a mother would leave alone her kids forever, in company of the remained shocked partner and grand-parents or uncles, and aunts, neighbors unable to give proper answers to them.
Magdalena was just 14 years when her mother left the house and an astonished husband, who had loved that woman with all himself. The parents of the husband recriminating that that girl was not the best one he could have chosen are looking in shock at Magdalena, a teenager who wanted to discover, desperately, where her mother went and why.
But no one knew it.
The sensation of a house, when a mother leaves it forever, is the one of an abandoned place an abandoned lifeless nest; there is not anymore any kind of stability, peace, harmony in the house but tensions, recriminations, fear, anger. When she left the house, Magdalena didn't just choose of leaving the house, but also her past, parents and relatives included.
The act of removing what previously experienced was made by her pretty well, but Magdalena hasn't never forgotten Apollonia.
One day, her agent calls Magdalena, who with the time became an actress of theater, (she prefers theater for the strong emotions that donates, for the reality, the life, existence lived in the moment without any kind of filter), telling her the news. "They have found your mother"; just these words and Magdalena leaves everything for Bretagne for trying to see what kind of existence built her mother in their absence: her soul is plenty of questions and stress.
The arrival is pretty shocking. Magdalena won't find a person in good health, Apollonia is 80 years at the moment: the conditions of the house are very poor. She decides that she will stay, she will cook, she will clean the house, she will restore dignity to that lost soul of Apollonia: although the silences of her mother, she will discover what it is necessary to discover, thanks to old journals and a picture. Magdalena understands now which was the germ that caused the sufferance of her mother.
In the while there is also a pretty spicey love-story with a boy much more young than her, met in a Decathlon; she will live beautiful and sensuals adventures with him.
The book opens several emotional windows: the past with its questions, Magdalena, still teenager and desperate, the reconstruction of what it was the departure of her mother with the consequent feelings, and sensation of loss; the present, with the trip to Bretagne and then the daily activities of Magdalena: the spicey adventure lived with the boy of the store; her mother, her past, her disconnected present, her play Antigone.
An intense, emotional, beautiful book!
Highly recommended.
I thank Chez Grasset for the physical copy of the book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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