Although only her first novel, Cristina Comenci arrives at the unwholesome heart of a central relationship — the one between father and daughter — with a firm narrative tread and the clearest of literary brush-strokes. Although it is lightly regarded in a culture where the maternal rules and all the emphasis is on the special bond with the male child, the awkwardness of the father/daughter encounter is here brought to light through the appearance of a psychosomatic condition in Frederica. She becomes completely silent with a case of aphasia or chronic speechlessness, a mysterious mechanism which is the unhappy result of a complex sequence of emotional events, to which only her diary is a witness. A very silent witness because the relevant pages have been torn out.


What happened in that irretrievable moment of memory, a moment forever inscribed into her consciousness and that robs her of the power to communicate? No-one understands her illness but somehow there is the mark of an accusation against the father, an accusation he is sure he can overcome as he overcomes everything in his life. But the invincibility which has won him a position in society and unchallenged authority over his family crumbles in the face of the misery of his daughter’s condition. Federica’s aphasia forces him into a dialogue with himself and deeply undermines him. He discovers then his own inability to speak, his own kind of silence, his emotional illiteracy.


The Missing Pages is the heartfelt, perhaps heartbroken work of a writer who puts her trust in the primacy of sentiment without being sentimental and in the power of words to speak the profundity of lived experience.

‘«Federica, that’s the way I am. I can reason, I can think, but that’s it. I can’t understand you and your problems, just as I’ve never been able to understand your sisters». He lowered his eyes. «Nor your mother properly, for that matter. Forgive me for spilling all these things out to you in this way, but I’m not used to talking about them.»’ p186