#RivetingReviews: Rosie Eyre reviews STRUCK by Susanna Bissoli, translated by Georgia Wall

‘So you’re writing.’

‘I can’t do it any more, Dad.’

‘What you on about?’

‘You have to finish telling stories, and mine end halfway through. They all get stuck, like me.’

Such is the predicament facing Vera, the protagonist of Struck, a frustrated writer who finds herself ‘stuck’ in more ways than one after receiving a second breast cancer diagnosis that forces her to put her life on hold all over again, seven years on from losing her mother to the same disease. As translator Georgia Wall explains in her illuminating afterword, the novel’s English title is a patchwork of meaning, with Struck capable of conveying both the clinical implications of the illness that has swept the rug from under Vera’s feet, and the more hopeful notion of ‘the spark that might ignite a story, or indeed any creative work’. Unfortunately for Vera, at the start of the book the latter is in short supply, and her hopes of inspiration striking appear to shrink even further when, caught between a rock and a hard place by her sister’s ultimatum that she can’t go on living alone during her next round of treatment, she concedes to move back into her childhood home with their eighty-year-old father, Zeno.

Zeno, too, has been struck down in the medical sense, boasting a dazzling array of comorbidities that, having started with a bad leg that has plagued him since his wife’s death, are only mushrooming as he enters his ninth decade. However, unlike Vera, his health concerns haven’t dampened his creative ‘spark’, as Vera discovers when she stumbles on his collection of handwritten notebooks telling the rocambolesque life story of the loveable fictional wide boy, Gianni Sarti. And, once his secret writerly endeavours have been rumbled, Zeno decides that his daughter’s return home is a perfect opportunity to enlist her tech skills to type them up on her laptop.

Over the course of their sessions in Zeno’s study – during which Zeno dictates the contents of his notebooks as Vera scrabbles to hit the keys fast enough – it soon becomes apparent that the pair couldn’t be more different writers. Whilst Vera agonises over the mechanics of story craft, even making full stops and commas metaphors for illness and death, Zeno sees punctuation as a superfluity; and as she despairs at only being able to write ‘fragments’ of stories, he’s so swept up in the flow of his that he doesn’t even stop to add chapters. Fortunately, this makes them perfect co-writers, as Vera tidies up the dots on the i’s and crosses on the t’s in a kind of father-and-daughter take on Jack Sprat and his wife.

For all Zeno’s writerly vim, we realise quickly enough that his tale probably won’t be winning the Strega Prize any time soon. However, as it turns out, that’s not really the point. More than anything, what these father and daughter sessions offer Vera – and in turn us as readers, through her first-person narration – is the chance to spend time with Zeno, and to fully appreciate the remarkable character he is. And, like the electrical charge of a lightning bolt spreading through a crowd, through their newfound companionship, Vera comes to realise that inspiration may be closer at hand than she thought.

All the main characters in Susanna Bissoli’s cast – Vera’s attentive but not-quite-permanent-fixture partner Franco; her well-meaning but overbearing sister, Nora; and her endearing young niece, Alice – are well-drawn. But of all of them, it is Zeno that will stay with me. Having finished his education with primary school, to spend the rest of his career running the family’s warehouse business, what he lacks in formal schooling he amply makes up for in life experience. In his lively anecdotes and unpretentious humour, which are brought to life by dialogue teeming with colourful expressions, there was something joyous about discovering glimmers of family members past that I never expected to find in the balmy climes of Veneto. I smiled at every instance of the word ‘ruddy’, and laughed out loud at the description of the ‘soaked keks’ of one of the warehouse’s former employees after a particularly enthusiastic drinking session at the wholesalers’ market.

The way in which Zeno and his family are brought to life through their everyday exchanges is done with such a sense of spontaneity that it was only when I turned the final page – feeling slightly bereft to have left them behind – that I realised from Georgia Wall’s afterword what an intricate translation task had been required to render Zeno’s Paduan dialect in English. For my money as a reader, the decision to draw on regional and vernacular English was – in the spirit of the book’s titular theme – a stroke of genius. Not through any dislocation or dilution of the Italian setting, but by creating an immediacy that transports us right to the centre of family life in Quaderni, and enables us to share in the characters’ joys and tribulations in all their bittersweetness.

Like Zeno’s infectious storytelling, Struck is a book that speaks to the heart, in a reflection of the heart with which it was clearly written and translated. As we are invited into the daily life that he and Vera share during their parallel periods of illness, we realise that these seemingly mundane moments are what truly knit us together – and that sometimes, it is only by being ‘stuck’ that we can savour them while they last.

Reviewed by Rosie Eyre

STRUCK

Written by Susanna Bissoli

Translated from the Italian by Georgia Wall

Published by Linden Editions (2025)

June 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Rosie Eyre is a literary translator from French and Spanish, whose translations span adult fiction, non-fiction and titles for young readers. Her recent publications include the thrillers The Stranger in the Seine and Angélique by French novelist Guillaume Musso, and the Unicornia series by bestselling Spanish children’s author Ana Punset.

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