What a dark little book. Published in Italy in 1997, it has been translated into eight languages, was was published in the USA in 2000. The description on the dust jacket is a little coy: it explains that it is about the play of five children, between the ages of 10 and 15, as they start to explore sex and violence. The quotations from the British newspaper reviews are all positive, but they don’t actually mention what happens in this story.

Here is what happens: one of the children starts bringing in pornographic magazines into their secluded shed, and the children start copying what they see. The magazines become more and more violent and perverted, and so does the behavior of the children. Eventually one of the boys anally rapes the youngest girl with the handle of a tennis racket, and she bleeds to death.

The author, Simona Vinci, was born in 1970, and this is her first novel. She narrates these events in sparse and simple prose with no explicit judgment of what the children do. There’s also little explanation. The children smoke, drink and take drugs, but most kids who do that don’t end up collaborating in murder. There’s plenty of sensuality in the writing, although it is never pornographic and it is rarely explicit. The children are curious and they get pleasure from their bodies. They are curiously detached from emotions though: mostly they seem to want to keep boredom away.

This isn’t really about a return to primitive instincts, in the tradition of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Clearly there is a message about the danger of violent pornography and unsupervised children, but that hardly explains the style of the novel. I’m mostly reminded of Ian McEwan’s early work, especially The Cement Garden, where he takes pleasure in perversity in almost poetic writing, and his tone is more amoral than moralistic. Vinci’s writing is more poker-faced than McEwan’s; she cannot afford to betray any sense of humor or readiness to indulge in the shock value of her story.

In the end though, Vinci’s motives as the author of this story are unclear, and she can hardly evade the suspicion that she tells such a shocking tale as a way to get attention. There’s no shortage of books, both fiction and non-fiction, that have child sexual abuse at their plot’s core, but they are nearly always told from the point of view of adults. Here Vinci’s point of view is implicitly allied with the children even if she speaks in an adult voice. That’s what makes this book so distinctive and morally uncomfortable. Even though it is ultimately more of a gesture than a thesis, it nevertheless is provocative and I suspect that story will stay in your mind long after reading it.

Categories: Fiction