La scomparsa dell’alfabeto

Nona, a woman who has been diagnosed with a degenerative disease of the brain, decides to tell her former psychoanalyst, now a friend, about the passion that ruined her life, so that he will preserve its memory when her own has gone. It’s a story of love between the narrator and her female psychoanalyst. A relationship in many ways transgressive which first overwhelmed her and then left her with a terrible sense of abandonment. The same sense of abandonment the doctor is now struggling with since his wife left him. Wednesday after Wednesday, listening to her, the doctor enters into Nona’s heart while his rancour grows against his colleague who had broken the rules of the psychoanalytic relationship and was now the emblem of those who inflict the terrible pain of loss. Three lives linked by the thread of abandonment and memory. Nona, anguished by the progress of an illness that will destroy her mind; the doctor tortured by the memory of his wife; and his colleague Dr Merkel, tormented by guilt about her daughter’s anorexia which she cannot cure.

Valeria Viganò was born in Milan and lives in Rome. She is a contributor to the daily newspaper L’Unità. She has written radio plays. Her books include: Il tennis nel bosco (Theoria, 1989), Prove di vite separate (Rizzoli, 1992) and L’ora preferita della sera (Feltrinelli, 1995).

March 2009 – 256 pages, 14 x 20 cm

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