Can You Hear Me?

by Elena Varvello, Elena Varvello

Genres: Family Life; Historical Fiction; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

A riveting coming-of-age story with the precision of a Hitchcock noir by a masterful new voice in Italian literature.

"Suspenseful and elegiac, as beautiful as it is horrifying." --Karen Dionne

"A densely layered psychological mystery." --Chicago Tribune

"Reads like a collaboration between Daphne du Maurier and Megan Abbott." --The Irish Times

Over the course of one oppressively hot summer in the small town of Ponte, in northern Italy, one family's secrets are revealed and the community is torn apart by a terrible crime.

Sixteen-year-old Elia Furenti lives with his parents in a secluded house, a tight-knit family whose rhythms are dictated by the shifts in his father's emotional state. When the closure of the nearby factory leaves Elia's father without a job, however, home becomes an increasingly fraught environment. With the summer heat pressing down, Elia's father begins to spiral, his moods becoming increasingly dark and erratic, while Elia's mother refuses to acknowledge that anything has changed.

Meanwhile, a forbidden relationship blossoms, as Elia seeks refuge from the silence and tension at home. Events reach a breaking point one moonlit night, when a young woman climbs into a van and is taken into the deep, dark woods . . .

Release date: July 13, 2017

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 288

Sample

Praise for Can you hear me?

 

‘Can you hear me? poignantly touches on problems of friendships, families and coming-of-age in a small community in northern Italy. There is much beauty and sadness in this slim novel.’

Times

 

‘The novel is carried by both the brilliance of its setting and by a scattering of emotional truths . . . It is refreshing to read a novel of crime and darkness that eschews straightforward domestic noir, and Varvello was brave to write about the trauma that haunts her.’

Guardian

 

‘Move over Ferrante, there's a new Elena in town . . . The novel is something akin to noir, but the emphasis is on the psychological . . . It made me think of the opening of Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden.’

Independent

 

‘A claustrophobic read . . . Marrying the unsettling feelings of a coming-of-age tale with a panic-inducing abduction story, Varvello explores the psychological impacts of fear, love and mental illness in pared-back prose.’

Daily Express

 

‘Varvello is emerging as one of the strongest young voices in the Italian literary world . . . a bleak and vivid book, about the way that life can throw up events that are forever impossible to come to terms with, so that subsequent life is a joyless affair.’

TLS

 

‘I love books I can read all in one sitting (maybe with a break to make tea) and Can you hear me? by Elena Varvello was one of these. A thriller, a mystery, a coming-of-age story that utterly gripped me from beginning to end.’
Victoria Hislop, Good Housekeeping

 

‘Haunting . . . Set in a small Italian town in the late 1970s, Can you hear me? reads like a collaboration between Daphne du Maurier and Megan Abbott, a superb psychological study marinated in a teenage boy's simmering hormones . . . Varvello writes tautly lyrical prose (beautifully translated by Alex Valente), delivering an absorbing tale that draws the reader into a nightmarish fever dream of isolation and paranoia given a chilling sense of inevitability by Varvello's matter-of-fact tone and Elia's deadpan narration.’

Irish Times

 

‘A spare, underplayed and suspenseful story about a terrible crime eating away at a family.’

Sunday Herald

 

‘Elena Varvello's Can you hear me? is riveting and luminous. It's a gorgeous heart-rending novel that you want to finish in one sitting – and few readers will be able to resist the exquisite gravity of such temptation - but it's also a novel that you long to savour, to make last, to draw out because there won't be another one this rich, this compelling, this extraordinarily satisfying for a long, long time.’

Bret Anthony Johnston, internationally bestselling author of Remember Me Like This and Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award winner 2017

 

‘A taut, smart, viciously gripping noir about family and the destructive force of unconditional love. It took my breath away and kept me glued to the page until its heart-breaking end: a phenomenal achievement.’

             Kirsty Wark, author of The Legacy Of Elizabeth Pringle

 

‘A beautiful, stark, poignant account of fear, love and loss.’

Emma Flint, author of Little Deaths

 

‘I loved Varvello's pared-back writing style, and how she manages to say so much in so few words. An intense read, wonderfully anxiety-inducing, where everything is bubbling uneasily just below the surface.’

Claire Fuller, author of Our Endless Numbered Days        

 

‘Haunting, surreal, and deeply engaging, Elena Varvello's Can you hear me? is at once suspenseful and elegiac, as beautiful as it is horrifying, as Varvello takes us deep inside the mind and heart of 16-year-old Elia Furenti during his summer of change. Readers will devour this novel in one sitting as I did, then chew over it long after the book is done.’

                Karen Dionne, author of The Marsh King's Daughter

 

‘Can you hear me? shines a light on one family’s black heart, a place where opposites coexist: tenderness and fear; happiness and pain; unfaltering faith and ugly suspicions. A book to get lost in.’

Paolo Giordano, bestselling author of The Solitude of Prime Numbers

 

‘Reading Can you hear me? is like being swept away by a powerful current. The best Italian novel of the year’

Fabio Geda, bestselling author of In the Sea There Are Crocodiles

 

‘One of the best Italian novels of 2016. A book that doesn’t shy away from pain – it shines a light on it. And it does so beautifully, page by page’

Alessandro Baricco, bestselling author of Silk

 

‘Can you hear me? is one of the most beautiful, intense and original books I have encountered in my life... A beautifully written book, that brings to mind Cormac McCarthy.’

Huffington Post Italy

 

‘Elena Varvello has written both a noir and a coming-of-age novel that is in some ways reminiscent of Niccolò Ammaniti’s I’m Not Scared . . . She

reveals the widening cracks slowly, perceptively, as one family scene unfurls from another, telling the story through omissions that become enigmas’

Il Messaggero

 

‘It brought back to mind Elsa Morante’s Arturo’s Island, and those classics with the ability to capture the abyss of adolescence, authors like Moravia and Bassani . . . This novel will grab you instantly and force you to read with a growing sense of panic, something tight in your throat: like a noir of ordinary life, bloodless and thus even more ruthless’

La Stampa

In the Woods

In the August of 1978, the summer I met Anna Trabuio, my father took a girl into the woods.

He stopped the van at the side of the road, just before sunset, asked her where she was going, and told her to get in.

She accepted the lift because she knew him.

They saw him drive towards town with his lights off, then he left the road, took a steep and difficult path and made her get out, he dragged her along with him.

 

My mother and I waited for him, worried he might’ve had an accident. While I stared into the darkness from the lounge window, she made a few phone calls.

‘He’s still not back.’

I found her leaning against the wall, in the hallway, the receiver clutched against her chest.

‘Everything’s fine, you’ll see,’ she said, trying to smile, as if she’d just heard his van, his footsteps in the yard.

She phoned the nearest hospital: she sighed with relief when they told her he wasn’t there.

She put some coffee on and we sat down at the kitchen table. She was wearing a blue dress, with long sleeves, dotted with small green palm trees that looked on the verge of being violently uprooted by an unstoppable wind.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said.

I went back to the lounge, lay down on the sofa and dozed off, a confused sleep that didn’t last long.

My mother was in the yard. ‘Why don’t you go to bed?’ she asked.

‘Not tired any more.’

She reached over to hug my shoulders and looked up to the sky: ‘Look how clear it is.’

‘Are you cold?’ I asked.

It was a summer night, and she was shaking.

 

She went to lie down and I tried reading a comic.

Half an hour later she left her room. She was wearing a blanket over her shoulders. She shook her head: ‘It’s pointless, I can’t rest.’ She went to the bathroom, then went back into the kitchen and called me. ‘Do you want to stay with me for a bit?’ She pulled the blanket up to her chin.

Before dawn, through the silence, we heard his van.

She turned towards the door, straightened her back, shook off the blanket and ran her hand through her hair. ‘Oh thank goodness. Thank God.’ I watched as she got up, straightened her dress on her hips and headed outside: ‘Darling, what happened to you?’

I followed right behind her. I stayed on the porch, under the light, trying to make him out in the darkness. I was angry and relieved: I wanted to slap him and tell him I didn’t care – you could’ve just stayed there; I wanted to run over to him and make sure he wasn’t hurt.

They stepped into the light, slowly, and I watched them go inside.

I was sixteen.

He had been gone a long time already, but that was it – not even a year after he lost his job and that boy disappeared – that was when everything broke.

Truth (1)

Can you hear me?

I remember his voice, at night.

Waking up all of a sudden, that summer, I’d hear the water going in the bathroom, my father’s steps in the corridor, him coughing. My mother kept calling him: ‘Come to bed.’ He’d reply: ‘No time.’

He’d head down to the garage, or sit at the kitchen table.

I’d fall asleep again.

On one of those nights I heard my father’s breathing from the other side of my bedroom door.

I stayed as still as possible, listening. He came inside.

‘Elia?’

The light was on behind him.

‘Elia, can you hear me?’

I opened my eyes very slightly. I wanted to ask him: What is it, Dad? What’s going on with you? Instead, I turned the other way, pretending to sleep, pulling the covers over my head.

 

My father’s name, the low and gravelly voice with which he said it: ‘My name is Ettore Furenti.’

My mother adored him. I’d often catch her admiring him, her chin on her hand, a smile across her lips.

‘Your father is so beautiful. And he always makes me laugh.’

And he was fun: his laughter was contagious, and he had a whole collection of stories he liked to tell.

‘Elia? Come here a second.’

‘What is it?’

‘You need to hear this one.’

A big, bulky man, wide forehead, black hair and eyes of a watery blue – she was small, tiny, and always cold, chestnut hair and eyes. I can still see how he’d hold her against him, just back from work, with his coat still on, both so young: they turn and smile as they catch me watching them. I see them walking into the bedroom, my mother’s head only just up to his shoulder, and he winks at me, closing the door.

In summer, on Sundays, he’d take me to the river for a swim, or to the cinema – his profile against clouds of smoke, in the dimmed lights, and the way he’d start whistling as we left, and say: ‘Let’s play a trick on her when we get home.’ He’d make the turn onto our drive, roll down to the garage and carefully close the car doors, chuckling, and she’d know what we had in mind, but still exclaimed: ‘I wonder when they’ll be back.’ He’d grab her by the waist and kiss her neck and she’d shriek then burst into laughter.

‘You scared me.’

‘His fault’ – he’d point at me – ‘it was his idea.’

But there were moments when he’d change, and he’d lock himself in the garage and we were not to disturb him. He’d sit under the porch canopy, on the swing, for hours, wringing his hands, biting his lips. I caught him sobbing, one afternoon – everything was still fine then – sitting in the bathtub, pale and shivering, with his knees clutched to his chest.

When he was particularly tired or worried, he’d stutter: he’d pause, shake his head, hit his thigh with his closed fist.

He could freeze in a second – she never was able to do the same – and become cold and sarcastic; he’d stare at us as if we were wrong somehow, his lips curled in a sneer; then everything would go back to normal and I’d hear them muttering, I’d hear my father’s laugh.

 

I knew very little about his past.

He had lost his parents at eighteen, within three months of each other. No other relatives, just like her. One summer, before they died, he’d worked as a mechanic at the petrol station, and after that he was employed at the plant.

‘I don’t remember much,’ he’d answer, whenever I tried asking him about it.

He often went out with my mother – into town for a stroll, or a coffee, or for a meal at Il cacciatore, along the road that zigzagged through the woods, leading to our house and that of Ida Belli – but he had no friends and never showed signs of missing anyone.

‘I need no one.’

I’d ask her, sometimes, what he’d been like when he was younger.

‘Pretty much the same as now.’

A funny man, I’d tell myself, armed with quick comebacks. It was always an odd sight to find him on the porch, staring at the garden and the woods in silence, or locked up in the garage.

 

My mother, on the other hand, had Ida, and she loved her.

‘She’s like a sister.’

She was a tall woman, short hair, sharp jaw, quite brusque and with a horsey laugh; she could suddenly strangle you with a hug, or sl. . .