Set over a few months in 1943 in the Piedmont countryside, this short novel explores the relationship between two partisan couples during the German occupation of Italy. Ada and Paolo take refuge in a village not far from Turin. Stefano stays in Turin for his work, but his wife Giulia visits Ada and Paolo as often as possible, especially when Paolo’s health worsens. The relationship between the three of them intensifies, although remains largely unexpressed. The war is there in the background, and the dangers and difficulties of the occupation lightly referenced, but the focus of the book is this claustrophobic relationship. It’s nicely written, with an almost dream-like narration, a quiet and melancholy tale, but one which didn’t do much for me. I couldn’t really engage with the characters, and essentially wasn’t much interested in their situation. Good to discover an unknown (to me) Italian writer I but was left feeling underwhelmed.

Where there is love
Even silence
Is word
Lalla Romano

A silence shared is a brief, intimist and atmospheric novel by the Italian writer and painter Lalla (Graziella) Romano (1906-2001), in which she solidifies and transforms silence into words, soaked in melancholy, longing and quiet joy – lauding the strength and the solace not to say anything, the consoling feel of tears flowing gently like the thawing of snow, cleansing and washing away waste, the dribble of weakness.

Taking refuge from the bombings of Turin, perching with her cousins in a taciturn village in the countryside, Giulia, a young woman whose husband Stefano has stayed in Turin for work, befriends Ada and Paolo, a couple that equally fled to stay in the even more remote group of houses of Tetto Murato (the original title). Fascinated by this couple and their obvious differences (the vivid impulsiveness of Ada; the intellectuality and thoughtfulness of Paolo), Giulia, from offering them a helping hand, slips into the intimate orbit of the couple. Ada is an aristocrat of the imagination, a Grand Duchess from a fairy-tale. Communication between the couple Paolo and Ada is scarce, Ada alludes to how little Paolo shares of his thoughts or what he does with her. Soon the reader realises to be in the same position. Paolo is secretive– there are subtle allusions to his activities in the resistance. He stays an enigma to the reader, he leaves people wanting. Yet Giulia’s senses their kindredness, the Elective Affinities that connect her to Paolo, more than to her husband Stefano, whose temperament in turn rather echoes Ada’s than Giulia’s. Giulia’s daily walks to Tetto Murato through the wintry landscape seamlessly flow into her barely going back to her cousins at all, sitting at the couple’s table with other family members, sharing their meagre meals and even their conjugal bed. Isolated, unable to leave the hovel because of Paolo’s illness, cut off from the world physically and psychologically, they withdraw inwardly. The ongoing war, the patrolling of the fascists dissolve into the background, the intensity of unspoken emotions reduce the war and its atrocities to piped music that is not noticed anymore.

Lalla Romano wrote that "For me, to write has always been to pluck from the dense and complex fabric of life some image, from the noise of the world some note, and surround them in silence". The English translation took its title from the epigraph Lalla Romano derived from the friend who played an important part in her transition from painting to writing novels, Cesare Pavese (1908-1950): T'he only true silence is a silence shared'.

Written with subtle elegance, melancholic, unsentimental and detached, reminiscent of Natalia Ginzburg’s recount of her own family’s refuge to the countryside during World War II in the essay Winter in the Abruzzi, A Silence shared is a quiet and sensory study of the impact of unexpected seclusion on relationships and a wonderful tribute to the beauty of life.
(*** ½)

This a beautifully written book set in Italy 1943-45. The narrator, Giulia is living in the country with her cousins while her husband works in the city. She becomes intrigued by a couple, Ada and Paolo, suspected of being part of the resistance. She becomes friends with them and forms an intimate bond, staying overnight including in their bed. Paolo is recovering from some illness, perhaps a brain injury and Giulia visits every day. What’s going on in the rest of the country is only mentioned briefly here and there, the focus is on the relationships and for me this was its weakness. While I found it a very easy read and was fascinated by the characters, I’m not sure how much I will remember of this quiet storyline.

a dreamlike, wintry, oddly sexy little novella.

really appreciated the translator’s and author’s notes, which bookend the novel with just the right amount of context to understand the thread of disquiet that comes from the novel’s engagement with occupation/the war.

At the risk of sounding clueless, I have to admit that I could not follow this novel. I couldn't understand what was going on. It reads like a diary.

I liked the writing, however, the storytelling didn't work for me.

This novelette reads like a diary, in that it is of course a) autobiographical and b) demands the reader to have knowledge of name-dropped characters as if from previous entries. It's interesting, because I constantly felt like I was missing out on some of the goings-on unfolding in the background of A Silence Shared, as if being only barely able to follow the work gossip of a friend whose job has nothing to do with my own.

Now, the whole... shall we say polycule??? the protagonists find themselves in was the main reason I was interested in reading Romano, and in some ways it delivered on the sexually charged situation resulting from co-habitation and intimate thought-enchanges. But in other ways, it remained so vague about the POV's feelings that I find myself disappointed. What's really going on here? Well, Lalla Romano won't tell us, but I bet fanfiction about that situationship exists.

** Note: This book is to be enjoyed more like a piece of art than a historical fiction, because if you're coming at it from that angle, it probably isn't going to work for you.**

This novella is a love letter to human relationships, to noticing the varying smiles on a friends face, to finding warmth around a table of shared food when it is snowing outside. To the white sun and shimmering mountains. To stillness. The prose feels like a still life painting come to life. The kind of painting that doesn't ask anything of you, doesn't want you to find a deeper meaning, just lets you enjoy being there with it.

I'd never heard of author Lalla Romano before. She is an Italian poet, artist and journalist (born in 1906 and lived to the ripe old age of 95), whose works have barely been translated into English until now. In this story/memoir (she likes to be sure you know she has taken creative license) written in the 90's, she writes about sheltering from the action of WWII in a little Italian town with a married couple whom become her dear friends.

It is a quiet, subtle, beautiful book that you a tell has been written by an artist. I recommend it to readers who like gentle stories and memoirs that focus on atmosphere and the delicate nuances of people and relationships. I personally really enjoyed it. It felt easy to read, refreshing, intimate, whilst ever so peaceful.

Lalla Romano’s spare 1957 novel traces the encounter between two couples hiding in Northern Italy near the end of World War II. By her mutual affection with Ada and Paolo, the narrator is absorbed into a provisional community destined to disband in unison with the German occupation. She reflects, “I knew for sure that nothing like this would ever have happened in real life.” By Romano’s account, war is misery, desperation, desolation, abandonment. It invokes a sense of “bewildered loss” which, in its universality, begets “something sweet.” War is not real life.

This novel of images (Romano was a painter before the war) is striking because those images seem to recede sharply just as soon as they’ve come into relief. I’m thinking of the narrator’s visit to the apartment where Paolo is staying in Turin. They dine together on his meager provisions in a scene that would certainly be vital if we were to read A Silence Shared as a novel overtly concerned with plot. Instead, once established, the scene dissolves into the occasion of it being recounted to Ada. The immediacy of a meal shared with a loved one is cut through by the narrator’s self-consciousness and by time’s lack of sentimental consideration. We’re in the realm of echos and reflections. Dreams (which are always “in some way dictated by me”) meld with memory. There’s something melancholy and touching about this place.

“It’s true that when the end already seems near, there is always still a stretch of time left,” says the narrator. Romano is interested in what we make of that interim, and our strange capacity to resist change even in the midst of desolation. Reading A Silence Shared, I felt that so much of the profound romance we crave is fated to a sort of liminal, suggestive existence. A man shares pears with Ada and the narrator on a train journey. She reflects, very simply, “The goodness of this man revived us.” Perhaps we should seek love’s vivifying effects in small gestures, silences and shadows. Who are we to demand that everything be laid out on the surface? Romano is an unusual writer in her intuitive understanding of this position, and the ease with which she permits language its limitations.

3.5/5

I'd first like to say thank you to NetGalley for giving me an opportunity to read this novel. Although it wasn't one of my favorite books, it held my interest to keep reading. And it wasn't the fact of the characters, but the setting; the time period it took place in. The trauma the characters had to watch as their country was in the middle of WWII. But mostly the struggles that we read about throughout the novel with the main character and his issues that I assume were caused by the war. I might be mistaken, but I believe I'm right. All in all, this novel I would recommend to people who love historical fiction, along with war novels. It might not talk much about the war itself; the effects are prominent throughout.

this was just all right, i guess. it kind of fell flat for me — i knew it was going to be kind of romance-y, but it ended up being too much for me, with all the romance and affairs taking up a huge part of the narrative. but it’s still a worthwhile read, especially if you’re into ww2.

A very welcome side-effect of the success of Elena Ferrante is the re-issuing of so-called ‘rediscovered masterpieces’ by post-war female Italian writers and poets. Famous ones, like Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg, but also lesser known authors such as Alba de Cespedes (of which I read the outstanding Forbidden Notebook last month), Anna Maria Ortese and now Lalla Romano.

A Silence Shared is an odd little novella though, set in the Piedmont countryside during World War II. Giulia, the first person narrator, is a young woman who has had to flee Turin and now lives with two old cousins in a large family house. Her husband has to remain in the city for work and Giulia befriends a married couple: the outgoing and enthusiastic Ada and the sickly, intelligent and mysterious Paolo. A triangle relation of some sort develops between Giulia, Ada and Paolo, which could only have developed in that way because of the extraordinary circumstances in which they find themselves. It stays platonic and perhaps that makes it even stranger.

I found the historical background interesting (1943-1945, surviving on little food and fuel in cold winters, but also the relation between former fascists and partisans and the backdrop of the occupying and slowly retreating Germans after the fall of Mussolini), but the novella is primarily concerned with the development of human relationships between evacuees.