I'd
love to tell you – A Novel by Maria Cristina
Buoso
Review
by Maria Teresa De Donato
"I’d love to tell
you so many things, but for too long I have held the words inside me... You
didn't know how to tell me 'I love you'" (Buoso, 2024, p. 7)
This publication, by its
author, Maria Cristina Buoso, highlights the problematic relationship between
father and daughter and their respective inability to appropriately communicate
their thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
In this novel, which
takes on the character of a personal diary, its protagonist, Diva, imagines
writing a long letter to her father, opening her heart and revealing everything
she would have liked to tell him, and that, for one reason or another, she never
did.
The heartfelt and painful
need to have his approval, to know that he was proud of his daughter, to
receive from her father those demonstrations of love and affection that she
would have so much desired and needed, especially after her mother's death,
which occurred when she was just nine years old, represent an excessive burden
for Diva. At times, they seem to take her joy in life and even her breath away.
The absence of her
father, even in the most important and tragic moments of her life, creates
suffering and multiplies doubts and misunderstandings about the possible
reasons that may have pushed him to assume such an attitude.
"You never told me 'bravo,'
you never had faith in my abilities, you always criticized and belittled
me." (p. 17)
The disappointment is
great in remembering how expectations have always been betrayed, how dreams and
hopes about her family have never come true: "... the pain of that time
has not yet completely eased and keeps consuming me together with the wounds
that your indifference has inflicted upon me." (p. 30)
Despite the inner
suffering, frustration, and sadness arising from the awareness of how things
went and how, on the contrary, they could have gone if there had been the
ability on her father’s side to understand his daughter's needs and show her
the affection and attention she so much desired, the memories that surface in
Diva's mind and the consequent venting that she gives by writing this sort of
diary, a letter to her father, lead her to an introspective analysis.
This latter strengthens
in her the need to meet her father, to confront him, to ask for explanations of
his behavior, to understand his reasons, and also to tell him about her life,
the one she has led since she left her home and the successes, especially the professional
ones, she had.
Thus, between one memory
and another, despite the outburst and the insistent accusations, paradoxically,
the resentment fades away while the need to meet grows, to make peace, to tell
each other how much they love each other and how proud they have always been of
one another. The need to break down the wall of silence that has generated
useless and inexplicable tensions and misunderstandings becomes urgent, forcing
Diva to hit the road in search of her father.
In the meantime, Life has
gone on its way and will reserve a great and unexpected surprise for her.
The novel ends with a poem that the Author dedicated to her father after his death and whose verses are made up of the chapter titles.
In a futurist style that we have already encountered in her collection of verses Schegge di parole, the metrics, which in fact do not exist, are replaced by apparently disconnected words thrown there on the sheet. Reading them, however, a rather clear picture appears of a man who, having worked hard all his life, has kept secrets and sufferings inside himself without being able to show his loved ones, and especially his daughter, the great love he always had for them and that, despite appearances, has motivated all his choices and decisions.
I'd love to tell you
is a novel written from the heart that will lead the reader to a deep
reflection on the importance of never judging people by their appearances by
attributing wrong motives to certain of their behaviors, but rather to grant
the benefit of the doubt as their past could hide unspeakable secrets and
sufferings that the person has not been able to free himself from nor, much
less, has had the strength and courage to reveal... much less to his children.
