I wanted to join in Women in Translation month, so was looking around my shelves for possible candidates – and chose Follow Your Heart (1994) by Susanna Tamaro, translated from Italian by Avril Bardoni. I picked it up in a nearby charity shop a couple of years ago without knowing anything about her – I was attracted by the slimness of the book first and foremost, but the description also intrigued me: a grandmother writing a long letter/diary/confession to her estranged granddaughter. And, wow, it didn’t disappoint.
Apparently this was a huge international bestseller in the mid 90s, so possibly everyone knows about it already – I was only nine years old when it was first translated into English, so it passed me by. I’m always slightly suspicious of bestsellers (can they truly be good when that many people are reading it?) but I was blown away by the way Tamaro captures the voice in this novella.
Olga is an 80-year-old who has raised her granddaughter (I think unnamed?) almost single-handedly, since Olga’s daughter died in a car crash when her daughter was only a few years old. She describes moments of beautiful synergy, as they experience and love the magic of the natural world together – and how she naively hoped this would last forever. But the granddaughter is now newly an adult and has decided to study abroad – splintering an already fragile relationship.
I remember the day you left. What a state we were in! You wouldn’t let me come with you to the airport, and every time I reminded you to pack something or other you told me, ‘I’m going to America, not the desert!’ As you walked through the door, I shouted in my odiously shrill voice, ‘Look after yourself,’ and you, without even turning round, left me with the words, ‘Look after Buck and the rose.’
At the time, I must confess, your words left me with a deep sense of frustration. Sentimental old woman that I am, I had expected something more banal: a kiss or a word or two of affection. Only later that night, when I had given up trying to sleep and was wandering round the empty house in my dressing gown, did I understand that looking after Buck and the rose meant looking after the part of you that still lives with me – the happy part.
The first section of the novella is really just Olga walking around her home, remembering, thinking, reflecting. It is in the form of a letter to her granddaughter, but in the same way that Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is a letter to John’s son (and, indeed, Gilead is the book I was most reminded of – a very big compliment from me, of course). That is to say, Olga’s granddaughter is the one being continually addressed, but we have no idea if this letter will ever be sent – it’s really a way for Olga to frame her thoughts. And it’s beautiful. She is painfully honest with herself, not allowing the refuge of any comforting lies – whether about her own behaviour, the future of this relationship, or even about the lifespan of the birds and beasts she delights in seeing.
Tamaro’s (and Bardoni’s) major achievement is that capturing of voice. That’s what carries you through a book like this, and there is a rich gentleness throughout.
As the novella progresses, there is more plot – specifically about a past lie that Olga told, and an affair she had. We learn more about her marriage, about the man she had an affair with, and about the long shadow of implications this had on her relationships with her husband, daughter, and granddaughter. I think I preferred Follow Your Heart when it was less tethered to specific incidents, but Tamaro manages to get plot in without losing the strength of the novel – that voice. And, like anybody coming towards the final years of their life writing to a much-loved, younger person, she wants to share wisdom.
I kept thinking that Follow Your Heart is the sort of novel that people claim The Alchemist is. I wrote in my review of The Alchemist that ‘the novel tries to become extremely profound, and succeeds in sounding rather silly. There’s an awful lot about following your heart and the truth being in all of us etc. etc., and it began to feel a bit like a thought-a-day desk calendar’. Despite Tamaro having chosen exactly a ‘follow your heart’ title – well, in fact, the original Italian translates as Go Where Your Heart Takes You – there is so much more profundity and depth in her novel. In isolation, it may not show all of that depth – but, in context, it was beautiful. But I’m going to isolate it, nonetheless…
Little by little the music faded into silence, and with it went the profound sense of joy that had been with me in my first years. The loss of joy, I must say, is the thing I have mourned more than any other. Later, indeed, I felt happiness, but happiness is to joy as an electric light-bulb is to the sun. Happiness is always caused by something; you are happy about something, it is a feeling that comes from the outside. Joy, on the other hand, is not caused by anything. It possesses you for no apparent reason; it is essentially rather like the sun, which gives off heat thanks to the combustion of its own core.
Over the years I abandoned my self, the deepest part of me, to become another person, the person my parents wanted me to be. I exchanged my personality for a character. Character, as you will find out for yourself, is valued much more highly than personality.
From the opening pages, I fell in love with Follow Your Heart. As I say, it reminded me a lot of Gilead, and I’m always looking for books that have that exceptional creation of character – and especially ones that manage to be gentle without being saccharine. Tamaro has written a lot, though only a few of her books seem to have been translated into English – I’ll certainly be looking out for more.