Without my mother: a French rural drama

Published in 1976, Crazy genius is the best-known novel by Inès Cagnati (1937-2007), a French writer of Italian origin little known among us and who, now, thanks to the good work of the Balearic publisher Quid Pro Quo and an impeccable translation by Marta Marfany, we have the possibility of starting to read in Catalan. Among other titles she left behind, this harsh and dark story, like the world it portrays, stands out on its own merits: a rural and impoverished France that we can only imagine in black and white and enveloped by a fog that suffocates everything. The rivers, the wind in the willows, and the daisies growing along the roads have the same weight and receive the same treatment, exquisite and brutal at the same time, as the most unconfessable family secrets.

At the center of everything is a mother-child love story difficult to overcome in harshness, but which is sensed to be crossed by a very deep love. The words sea and daughter do not appear even once in the entire novel, even though the narrator's voice is that of the daughter. The mother, who is the one nicknamed boja due to an untimely pregnancy, she has no gesture or word of love for her daughter, whatever the circumstances they go through, and there are very painful ones. The daughter only runs after her mother or waits for her alone, at night, at the door of the house, when she returns from breaking her back working in the fields, in the corrals or in the kitchens of the village houses.

Inherited silences

The novel's style fits like a glove with the dryness of what it explains and enhances the dramas that simmer within it. With a high awareness of sentence rhythm and a capacity for synthesis that leads to the evocation of what is not explained, the novel's strength lies in what happens off-screen: if we see a little girl in a wrinkled floral dress and a priest sitting in a chair beside her, nothing more needs to be explained. The first third of the book, which is basically a presentation of the mother's character made only through the eyes and voice of the daughter when she is still young, is a marvel.

The novel is also a tribute to the cyclical rhythm of nature: the harvests, the animals on the farm, the foxes surrounding the house almost ready to attack it, the harvests under the sun, the slaughter of the pig... and, alongside all this, which acts as a balm, there are the catastrophes that erupt in small communities: terrible and, what's more, covered up with silences inherited from generation to generation. Families that do not forgive a single slip-up, grandmothers who do not love their granddaughters because they are bastards, and grandfathers who just sit in a corner reading books about ancient and mad kings. A world where men impose the law and women are nothing but beasts of burden, always available to clean a very dirty court or to get into a very clean bed: there is no difference between the service provided in one place or the other.