Published in Italy in 2022; published in translation by Grove Press, Black Cat on June 27, 2023
Dysfunctional families can be charming, at least in Rome. As children, Verika and her more intelligent brother were rarely allowed to interact with a world that their protective parents regarded as far too dangerous. They devised meaningless games to escape boredom, games at which Verika invariably but pointlessly cheated. From this, Verika learned a life lesson. “Whenever I feel like I’m trapped in a room, in a game with rules, rather than try to escape from it I try to taint the logic of the room, of the rules.” She invents her own reality. Perhaps this reality invention makes Verika an unreliable narrator as she tells the reader her life story.
Both parents are strange. Verika’s father often says, “We have reached the height of paradox.” He loves to build walls, not just metaphorically. He has created multiple small rooms in their small apartment, cutting windows in half and making the bidet inaccessible. He wraps Verika in paper towels as a protection against perspiration, which he regards as the source of dangerous illnesses. Verika smells bad because her father thinks a good scrub with paper towels and alcohol is preferable to bathing.
Verika’s mother is convinced that her children are in danger and bombards them with calls when they are not in her presence. When Verika enters the world to attend school, her mother or father drives her or her brother walks with her, but their protectiveness cannot shelter her from the experience of life. Verika’s mother is horrified when Verika learns about the male appendage from a flasher who was lurking outside the school. When her mother tells her teacher “the girl believes she’s seen a wiener,” her classmates pass her sketches “that looked nothing at all like my vision of the reddish protuberance, which turned out to be reassuring.”
Yet for all their protectiveness, Verika’s parents are willing to let her visit a grandfather and sleep in his bed well beyond the age when a girl should be sharing a bed with an adult male relative. It isn’t clear that anything inappropriate happens, but it also isn’t clear whether Verika would recognize any activity as inappropriate, given her limited frame of reference.
Verika loses her fear of wieners when she learns that a girl can hold one in her hand (she finds one unexpectedly in her grasp while riding on a crowded tram and politely returns it to its owner). When she reaches her late teens, Verika has more experience with wieners but is less certain whether the things she’s done with them constitute sex. Those things seem to have been consensual, but Verika is lost in a world of her own, making it difficult to know whether she is suppressing the truth.
Lost on Me is Verika’s look back at her life. Verika tells her story factually (although not linearly), leaving it to the reader to deduce how the strange way in which was raised might have had an impact on her present. For the most part, Verika’s memories are amusing. To the extent they might be disturbing, Verika simply chooses not to be troubled by them. Her discussion of an abortion, for example, is unemotional. It’s just another thing that happened in her life.
As a young adult, Verika makes a number of discoveries in rapid order — about touch, about sex, about infidelity, about Berlin — although her narrative cuts those events into slices that she serves out of order. She is later astonished to learn how men can be so generous while asking so little in return — asking, that is, for something that means so little to her. She has boyfriends but she isn’t relationship material. She travels to Mexico with a female friend (where she is inevitably bombarded by calls from her mother) and later considers (without emotion) how that friendship just drifted away. The friend is easily replaced by Amory Blain, the main character in This Side of Paradise.
In the present, Verika and her brother are authors. Verika writes books when she’s staying with people in Berlin. Lost on Me is her latest. Because Verika is honest about her dishonesty, it is difficult to know when her narrative is meant to be reliable or even whether that matters. She describes a 14-year relationship with A, yet none of her friends seem aware of A’s existence, perhaps because A changes bodies. Is he any more real than Amory Blain? Verika’s mother sends texts to A on his own phone, so it’s hard to know. Maybe Verika is lying about the phone.
Verika describes her father’s death, her mother’s loneliness (reported in telephone calls ten times a day), her dismal efforts to conquer insomnia with pills and masturbation. She claims a fear of physical contact yet feels a need to watch others touching each other. She tells people vague stories about friends unseen for the last two years who have two-year old children. Two years seems a sensible distance and age when she has no clue about the true number.
One of the novel’s most interesting themes is the malleability of memory. Verika is untrustworthy not just because she tells deliberate lies but because her memories are hazy. They “change in the process of forming.” That’s true of all memory. Two witnesses will remember the same event in very different ways because that’s how memory works (or doesn’t work). Lost on Me is impressive in its honesty, even if the reader might not know what to believe, because Verika understands more than most of us that having a memory doesn’t mean the memory is true.
Identity (more precisely, Verika’s lack of identity) is another key theme. Verika claims she is regularly mistaken for a male, perhaps because she often wears male clothing. She is convinced that others do not recognize her, but perhaps they are strangers who have never seen her before. Even her grandfather always photographed her facing away from the camera, taking pictures of a back that could belong to anyone. At times, her mother sees someone else in a photo and believes it to be Verika. She has felt, at every moment of her life: “Oh whatever. Let’s just say this is me.”
The “fullest expression” of Verika’s identity is the manipulation of truth “as though it were an exercise in style.” She claims to keep a “glimmer of truth” inside her but confesses that she often forgets it or conflates it with the lie.
Lost on Me, with its ambiguous truths and confusions of reality, comes across as an exercise in style. While it seems to be narrated as a stream of consciousness, its loose structure belies its careful construction. Veronica Raimo ends the novel by confessing that she writes “things that are ambiguous, frustrating.” She also says she’s “fine with that.” Readers who are not fine with ambiguity should probably look for a more concrete story. While Lost on Me can be frustrating, it is also an intriguing exploration of the often illusory distinction between truth and fantasy.
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