The missing pages

In this brilliant first novel, we are taken into the imperfect, modern world of a well-to-do Roman family where something has gone very wrong. In the rich, cool, hushed atmosphere of hidden emotions, unexpressed anxieties, and missed communications between adults and children, nineteen-year-old Federica Forte, a philosophy student and the youngest of three girls, has for some unknown reason gradually gone mute. The doctors diagnose her case as aphasia and neoteny, and her family gathers round, trying to draw her out, but to no avail. Federica, who still lives at home and keeps a diary, begins writing her father long notes, never using the same pen twice, and he too starts to keep a journal of her mysterious descent into silence. It becomes clear that while going to school, she has had an intense affair with a boy named Marco, who has disappeared. As Natalia Ginzburg has written, "A diary with some pages torn out of it, a small piece of silver hanging from a heel, a blurred photograph - these are the few clues from which the man [her father] is able to build a story which he sees half hidden in the darkness.". It is not until her father takes her away to their seaside house on Ischia, and together they experience a dramatic crisis while climbing Mount Epomeo during a violent storm, that Federica begins to recover. The cause of her silence is finally discovered in the missing pages of her diary, which reveal the shocking trauma to which she has been subjected. The Missing Pages is a story beautifully and lyrically told of a relationship between a father and his daughter. Fast-paced and with all the suspense of a mystery, it is a stunning debut in the manner of Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse.