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The Hands of Gravity and Chance is a family novel; everything happens between the members of a family and the existential tension of the characters follows the complex events resulting from their ties. Following the vicissitudes of those ties keeps the reader engaged in a narrative coloured with suspense, deep empathy and the painful weight of witnessing.
The book opens with a tragic and apparently punctual and fortuitous event. It is an event of chance. A girl falls down the stairs, and goes into a coma. Her mother is at her bedside and her two older brothers stay at home with their maternal aunt. We soon realize that the father died when the girl – Catherine – was a baby. As in a play of the Comedy of Art, the five characters who appear in the first, dramatic scene – Rose (the mother), Margaret (the aunt) and Rose’s children Erin (the elder), Damien (the second) and Catherine (the youngest) – never leave the stage. The initial event brings us into the folds of those complex ties that have led and will lead the members of this family to cross the boundaries of the unthinkable, to perform actions usually inconceivable.
The reader is guided in these areas, as if immersed in the mental flow of the characters. Dignity is given to every breath, every jolt, every nuance of thought through a style that reflects a specific aspect of the psychoanalyst's ear (Ogden and Ogden 2013), of his compassion. The author never judges, but remains open to follow how events, internal and external, could have led to such extreme choices and actions. Can a mother give up a child, choosing that it is no longer her own? Can she be a mother to some of her children and not to others? Can a mother be replaced? And what about a father? Can a brother and sister love each other as lovers with a love that does not, however, smack of perversion? And can they decide to raise a child together, as husband and wife? Can one decide to disappear from someone's life and still say one loves that person?
Thoma