…but I spent my time guarding the base, wearing out my eyes staring at the desert, at herds of goats roaming among the rocks, grazing on thorny tufts of grass; I fixed my binoculars on old men in turbans shuffling around in their slippers in the sand and lighting fires, perhaps sending smoke signals about our movements, and droves of barefoot children collecting scraps of metal and dragging water tanks and perhaps spying on us for their fathers.

Limbo tells the story of Manuela Paris, an Italian female soldier wounded in Afghanistan, while she waits for the army’s pronouncement on her status, which will define whether she can be deployed back to Afghanistan in the future. Her limbo is her family home in a little coastal town close to Rome where not much happens and no one understands what she’s going through. While dealing with PTSD, rehabilitation therapy and stifling family time, she falls in love with Mattia, a mysterious man staying in the hotel right in front of her mother’s apartment.

What I thought at first would be an almost cliché turned out to be a powerful story with multiple layers and deep human connections. The plot starts to build up slowly, transporting us from Italy to Afghanistan with an ease and beauty that’s hard to achieve, and soon I realized I was reading an amazing story about love, war, family and friendship. Mazzucco creates in Manuela a very solid character that portrays womanhood in a setting that’s far from what we understand as feminine, and she makes all the choices that led Manuela to be a soldier completely believable. The secondary characters are well-developed, endearing and helping Manuela grow as a person throughout the story. In Manuela’s relationships with her family, battalion and Mattia, she masterfully shows the intricacies of human connection, and the power it has to help us heal. For me, the only weakness of the book is that the ending focuses too much in Mattia’s story, nevertheless I easily overlooked it because the rest of the book is truly wonderful.

The most interesting element of the book is how Mazzucco plays with memories and longing. The book is told in two voices, a narrator- that tells the story in the present- and Manuela’s dairy (assigned by her psychologist) – in which she tells her story from recruitment to the moment of the attack in Afghanistan that left her wounded-. In Italy, Manuela is dying to return to Afghanistan -at nights she cannot fall asleep unless she takes powerful somniferous drugs and wakes up shouting and vomiting-. She remembers the dreamy landscapes, the captivating solitude, the striking colors, the neatness of the military live and the camaraderie. She idealizes the role of the Italian military as a rebuilder of a country burdened with misfortune. However, when we revisit her time in Afghanistan through her diary, Manuela talks about the pointlessness of war, the desperation and the boredom, and the hardships of being a woman in the military in charge of a battalion. Contrasting what Manuela remembers with what she actually lives, Mazzucco shows us how resilient humans and how we have multiple coping mechanisms to deal with trauma and disappointment.

Whenever I told someone I was reading a book about a soldier in Afghanistan they rolled their eyes. And, yes, I know the idea of reading about the Afghan invasion doesn’t sound very appealing, but I really recommend giving a try to this beautiful book, full of elements that keep surprising throughout the whole plot, amazing storytelling and vivid characters.

About Melania Mazzucco 

Melania Mazzucco is one of the most renowned contemporary Italian authors. She was born in Rome in 1966. She studied cinematography and before publishing her first novel in 1991, she wrote several screenplays. She has won several prizes for literature.  Limbo is her 7th novel.

Other books written by GENTILICIO women:

We only recommend books we’ve read

• My Brilliant Friend — Elena Ferrante (Read by Angélica and Ceci)
• The Story of a New Name — Elena Ferrante (Read by Angélica)

Which book do you recommend? Please let us know in the comment section!

Italian initiatives and projects that support and empower girls and women

GEMMA at GRT

The GEMMA – Gender-Based Empowerment of Women through a Multiagency Approach is a project that aims to offer interventions and responses that are adequate to the needs of migrant women or members of ethnic minority communities who have survived violence, to implement awareness-raising activities and promote the creation of protective networks to prevent and combat violence within local communities and to improve the capacity of the services to cooperate and respond to the needs of women surviving violence who belong to vulnerable groups. They carry out activities in Italy and abroad. The issues are addressed in collaboration with local centers to provide cultural and technical skills to improve existing services in the territory in favor of foreigners.