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the complete review - fiction

Hollow Heart

by
Viola Di Grado

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : intriguing premise; runs reasonably well with it

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "The plot spirals inwards, tightly wound, and there is a confessional earnestness which can be unsettling and verges on an over-exposure of the self. (...) Ultimately, it is the writing that elevates this book. Quirky, crisp, with plenty of dark, clever humour (.....) The novel is a fairy tale gone bad, with echoes of Angela Carter without the Postmodernism." - Suzanne Johnson, The Independent

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Hollow Heart begins with the narrator's suicide. On 23 July 2011 Dorotea Giglio slits her wrists in the bathtub and bleeds out. For all her trouble, the finality one comes to expect with death is rather a let-down, as she lingers on in semi-spiritual form, able to continue walking and stalking the earth, albeit by and large unseen; her employer treats like her she's the same, but she's invisible for everyone else in her (former) life. Death has some odd effects: she finds herself illiterate but still able to write, for example. But she can and does drift around, not exactly haunting her old haunts but revisiting them -- while also keeping a close eye on the steady decomposition of her corporeal form (which fares as dead and buried bodies are supposed to, rotting slowly away).
       Dorotea describes the fairly depressing life she had: she never knew her father, and her mother struggled raising her alone. She was about to graduate with a degree in biology when she offed herself at age twenty-five. She'd been on anti-depressants, and she had an aunt, Lidia, who was also a young suicide. She had had a boyfriend, Lorenzo, but he broke up with her ("via text message" -- though the cad had at least gone the maximum ("before the double rate kicks in") seven hundred character length in his dumping text).
       The narrative jumps ahead four years, only to turn back and examine the past more closely, suggesting in part what led Dorotea to take her life. Then the present takes over again, year by year of those first dead years, some in more detail, some less (2014 is covered in half a page).
       As Dorotea notes:

     The newly dead, after all the thanatocentric advertising offered by religion and art, have enormous expectations concerning death, and I was no exception to the rule.

     On January 4 I went to the cemetery with Euridice. After watching my decomposition for half an hour, she said: "I have to tell you something. I like your body. It's really lovely."

- M.A.Orthofer, 1 July 2015

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Links:

• Europa Editions publicity page
• edizioni e/o publicity page

• Crapula Club (Italian)
• finzioni (Italian)
• The Independent
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• The Modern Novel
• Il osservatori esterni (Italian)
• La stanza di Virginia (Italian)
• Tony's Reading List

• See Index of Italian literature

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About the Author:

       Italian author Viola Di Grado was born in 1987.

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