Bordighera Press in New York City has just published Kora Bättig von Wittelsbach’s translation of Anita, Alain Elkann’s penultimate novel. Elkann is a well-known Italian author and was a guest of in October 2019.
On its surface, Anita is the story of a woman who leaves a man. Saddened by and unprepared for the unexpected breakup, awash in remorse and nostalgia, that man, Milan, begins to tell himself an alternative version of the relationship, by imagining what it would have been like if he and Anita had met as children, instead of at sixty. With that, the reader is drawn into a love story filled with travels, encounters, passions, the disappearances of loved ones, and questions of what happens after death.
Central to the plot is the question of cremation or burial, as questions of death take center stage.
"If you believe the publisher i.e., the title, the cover layout, the blurb, it's a romance novel,” Camillo Langone writes, in il Giornale. “If you believe me, who has read the text enclosed within this romantic wrapping, it is a book about the dilemma, if not about the diatribe, cremation/burial."
The existential themes are approached with irony and a sense of curiosity. According to Elena Loewenthal of Il Foglio, "Alain Elkann takes [death] head-on and addresses it on virtually every page of this book. He tells us about his own death. Not just other people's. And he does so with an enviable ease, with a subtle, disorienting sense of humor. He mocks us and himself, as when he discovers that he slept for months with his girlfriend but also with the ashes of her mother, placed in a box in the bedroom, in plain sight."
The novel has been further praised in the Italian press. According to Claudio Baroni of Corriere della Sera, "Elkann's book envelopes and hypnotizes you with words after a prelude similar to a plane waiting for the green light from the control tower.”
The English translation of Anita is available through Small Press Distribution, Ingram Book Company and Bordighera Press.
