DON’T MOVE

Can you imagine a love affair beginning with a rape? That’s the challenge an Italian actress/second-novelist sets herself in her American debut.

Timoteo is the top surgeon at his hospital in an unidentified Italian city. His teenaged daughter Angela is brought in after a traffic accident. Her desperate condition frames his confession of an affair he had 16 years earlier. It begins as the 40-year-old surgeon is traveling to join his beautiful, elegant wife Elsa at their beach house. His car breaks down in a squalid working-class neighborhood. A woman lets him phone for help from her house. She’s the wrong side of 30, somewhere between trashy and ugly, yet Timoteo, suddenly inflamed, moves into her “like a raptor in a captured nest.” When he returns later to apologize, she doesn’t seem angry, and he takes her again. Italia, a hotel chambermaid, has no surviving family. Her father abused her sexually when she was 11. She is filled with self-loathing: “Weeds are hard to kill,” she says of herself. Italia becomes an unlikely love object for Timoteo, whose father has recently died, leaving him an “orphan.” He never liked his father, who was also attracted to solitary, unattractive women. Is Timoteo simply repeating the pattern? Or is it slumming that’s the thrill? Mazzantini leaves us guessing. Italia becomes pregnant and goes to the gypsies for an abortion. Then Elsa becomes pregnant with Angela. Split down the middle, Timoteo joyously attends the birth of his daughter but then returns to Italia, who’s hemorrhaging from the botched abortion. After her drawn-out death and funeral, Timoteo goes back to Elsa, although his feelings for her have always blown hot and cold. She doesn’t remark on his absence, which is strange, but after the rape nothing in this novel has seemed altogether believable.

The pull of the darkly irrational: it’s a fascinating theme, but Mazzantini doesn’t do it justice.