in_love_with_bookish 's review for:

Can You Hear Me? by Alex Valente, Elena Varvello

4.0

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

Few are the writers that can draw me to a book from the very first line, [a:Elena Varvello|4460447|Elena Varvello|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] is now one of those authors. The author is waving a story that comes from the past, shining the present and revealing a heartbreaking future; a future you wish you could change but deep down knows it’s a fixed point in the life of our narrator. This book is more like a dance than a story, a dance that’s both coy and mysterious and despite revealing early on what’s going to take place; you can’t help but be invested in the lives of each character.

“On the edge of the pool – he told my mother – he’d sometimes start screaming into the silence, to prove he wasn’t afraid, and his cries suddenly moved the stars and the wind, the leaves and the water and the creatures, the white, tired face of the moon. In those moments, he was God.”

The writing style is beautiful and full of light and darkness. It complemented the story and gave it extra wings. The words were hard to read sometimes because they carried this sense of longing and loss that was honest, sad and genuine.

Our story takes place in the summer of 1987 and it revolves around a father ( Ettore Furenti) and his son ( Elia Furenti) and its defining poignant genuine and utterly realistic relationship and a summer night that changed both their lives in a way impossible to ignore or shake down. It’s the story of a family incapable of letting go of a promise of hope and love and the truth that shattered that possibility. And in its core, it is the story of a boy coming to the realization that he never knew his father, never truly understand him and despite that distance between them and the horrible thing his father did that fateful summer night, he still loves him and that love is never really going anywhere.

“I knew nothing, back then, of the ways in which love can show itself, of the force with which it can push us into a corner and take our breath away.”

What’s also fascinating about the story is how it gives up its secrets right from the first chapters and yet it still manages to keep my attention till the end. The mystery is not what drives the story forward; it is the characters and the different dynamics between them all that gives the book its heart and soul. It is not a murder mystery or a psychological thriller that hangs everything on its twists. This book is much more than that, it’s the tale of a boy having to grow up in the midst of a tragedy, and it’s about a father losing his way ad being misunderstood and never really knowing how to fix the void inside of him, it’s about a mother loving unconditionally and losing that love in the worst way possible and it’s the story of real people searching for what is missing in their lives and maybe never really finding it.

“If you keep things to yourself they don’t seem as real.”

Poignant, genuine and deeply melancholic, Can you hear me is a beautifully underrated story about family, love and loss. You should definitely give it a chance.