A review by faintgirl
Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini

4.0

I finished Don't Move nearly a week ago, but it's taken me a remarkable amount of time to figure out what I felt about it. For a start, I hated the lead character. I'm pretty sure I was supposed to, but he really got my goat. He's a mildly successful hospital surgeon who starts an affair with a woman after she helps him when his car breaks down. She's from a different side of town, she has very little money, and she's not even attractive to him, according to his description, but he essentially rapes her in her own home, before starting a strange relationship full of weird power balances and half information. Shortly after the affair starts, the narrator finds out his wife is pregnant, and his attempts to avoid his lover only bring them closer together, whilst souring the relationship with his pregnant wife.

The story is told as some kind of apology to his daughter, who is now 17 and has been hit by a car whilst riding her Vespa to school. It's almost a confession, a desperate trade off with god to save the daughter he loves, but as he gets lost in the lurid details, it seems somehow dirtier than that. It's really quite a horrible novel, about betrayal, guilt, the nature of marriage and a ton of other things, and made me want to go back to being 14 years old and oblivious to all that stuff. But you get the impression he really does love his lover, despite the strange space their relationship exists in. In fact, the love might exist precisely because o that space.

Powerful and mesmerising, but really quite brutal at the same time.