---

The Unravelling Tragedy of Untold Lessons

.
Untold Lessons, Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, Pushkin Press, 2024, 272 pages, £16.99
.
.

Untold Lessons opens with a lurid image. ‘Shiny brown leaves’ look like ‘raw entrails’, a school satchel and the day’s newspaper lie among their pulpy darkness: the trappings of an educated, contemporary life, abandoned by their owner. It’s clear that something awful has happened. The narrative then slowly unfolds through a shopkeeper’s gossip and classroom mutterings; a student is dead and a teacher has disappeared. Maddalena Vaglio Tanet’s debut novel is a dark literary thriller seeking to unwrap the dark underside of life in the rural Italian town of Bioglio – or is it? Tanet is trying to write something that can’t be so immediately defined, somewhere between a true-story narrative – without the exploitative pitfalls of the genre – and a child’s fantasy story with real-world consequences.

Giovanna, a young Piedmontese girl, lives in a kitchen sink tragedy. Eleven years old and awkwardly pubescent, she has been convinced by her mother that ‘her boobs were a couple of bombs about to explode’. She dreams of escaping to the Alpine world her parents left behind to find better paid factory work in town. The banalities of life in a semi-industrial town small enough that everyone knows everyone else intrudes all the more harshly as her puberty progresses. Her father’s petty violence, a sign of his own desire to escape though Giovanna neither knows nor cares about that, shows no sign of letting up. Not sexually mature yet no longer innocent in the eyes of onlookers, Giovanna struggles in her skin. She exits the novel less than a quarter of the way through; her last thoughts shared with the reader are cruel, bitter, and powerless.

Silvia, the teacher, serves as the linchpin of the narrative, yet her struggle lies in lacking a strong anchor to her own sense of self. She doesn’t read as the most functional adult; she still eats most of her meals at her cousin’s next door and needs reminders to change her jumper when it starts to smell. She subsumes this absent-mindedness, initially, into the genderless, sexless identity of a teacher, thinking of herself not by name but by job. Her distance from that world is only reinforced by her having fewer notable worldly attachments than her best friend and fellow teacher, the speeding, powder-blue hatchback-owning nun, Sister Annangela.

If this were feel-good fiction, Giovanna might have learned from her quirky teacher that you do not have to fit into a socially acceptable category to be respected as a person. Instead, Giovanna takes a closing step, and unthinkingly, unintentionally, opens up a crisis of identity Silvia has no answer to. The loss of a pupil shakes Silvia to her core – a core she perceives, in an early hallucination, to be a ‘rejected black egg’. Womanhood at the time was still defined by one’s maternal instinct. Silvia’s failure to reproduce has left her feeling like an unwanted, unnatural thing, like a chicken that won’t lay. Orphaned, unmarried, childless, Silvia has none of the markers of adulthood that the women around her have; she can’t even justify it by turning to God as Sister Annangela has done, too tormented by the nuns of her youth in boarding school.

As Giovanna exits the scene, a young Puck enters. Martino is also struggling to fit into the village. A city boy exiled from Turin by the city smog which has given him asthma, he turns not to fairies but to the futuristic world of action comics, and their intrepid travelling heroes. He longs for their sideburns, if not the single earring that only they could pull off. His story becomes a children’s adventure when he goes on the ‘mission’ to find Silvia in the woods, provisions of butter and sugar sandwiches included. The adventure becomes significantly more serious as the real-term consequences sneak in, and Silvia challenges him with moral dilemmas whose answers aren’t as easily found as in the comics of Sandokan.

Tanet’s background in writing children’s books remains a clear reference point in her more adult writing, and not just in her choice to make two of her most important voices in this novel children. In her prose, the natural world becomes something out of a fairy tale, escapist and dangerous. Trees drip ‘cheerfully’, birds are tipped with gold. The plants breathe. The guts of the forest become less lurid, more vital. Sylvia can recognise every tree species. Her cousin, who came with her on these childhood mushroom-picking trips, can’t find her. A child from the city takes barely an afternoon. When Silvia enters the woods, whatever her inner narrative says, it is no longer the 1970s.

The story of the teacher and student is taken from the Tanet’s own family history, pieced together through newspaper clippings, family lore, eyewitnesses and authorial flights of imagination. One thing she has carefully not imagined, however, is the crucial moment. Giovanna’s suicide is shocking, not for the detail, but for its lack; in contrast with the visceral opening image, this moment is completely elided. Giovanna toes off her slippers, and then she is miles downstream; her final thoughts cut off, leaving her intentions unclear. The villagers say they don’t understand what she did or if she even understood it herself, yet they don’t dwell on her reasons. They gossip about Silvia, her differences, and her disappearance, but speculation about Giovanna is nearly absent.

Maybe there is justification in Tanet’s refusal to join in this speculation, either herself or through the voices of her villagers. In the author’s notes, Tanet directly quotes some of the articles she used to reconstruct the historical truths of the story. One can only hope that the tone of some of these quotes comes from a place of confusion rather than intentional cruelty – though perhaps this is false hope when true crime podcasts in the 2020s have hardly been less judgemental than newspaper writers in the 1970s. The desire for constant examination is part of a contemporary problem with ‘true’ stories, so often poisoned by the need to reveal ‘hidden depths’ to every participant and bystander, regardless of the effect on their mental or emotional well-being. Thankfully Tanet avoids such dissection; Giovanna in life is a girl on the cusp of puberty, angry, emotional, awkward and unsure. In death, she is wrapped in a shroud that refuses definitive answers for an impossible question.

Ultimately, Silvia, Martino and Giovanna form an unequal trinity. After Giovanna’s death, she nearly fades from the story altogether. Silvia takes over the narrative, with only the idea of Giovanna lingering as a key tormentor in Silvia’s troubled mind – a symbol of a childhood stripped of its innocence. Martino, arriving into the narrative only after Giovanna leaves, never interacts with her. Thematically, certainly, Martino and Giovanna are an interesting pair: one longs to return to the country, the other to the city. Both have absent fathers, emotionally or physically. However, Giovanna’s story contrasts so strongly with that of Martino, and even that of Silvia, that after her death she has to recede into the background, becoming a ghost in her own tragedy. But perhaps that is the dilemma: what more can be said about a child in this situation without slipping into moralising, theorising, or passing judgement – something Tanet is so determined to avoid?
.
.
.