Frieda

A family saga in which love, passion, solitude and betrayal are depicted against the background of great historical upheavals in the early 20th century.

A powerful historical fresco that takes us into Italy’s cosmopolitan environment of the Belle Époque, to the Vienna of joyous apocalypse, the Germany of the Great War then the Weimar Republic, already tainted by budding Nazism, and, finally, to the young and entrancing Buenos Aires of the Thirties.

This novel was written in parallel in French and Italian.

The Frieda of the book title is Frieda von Richthofen, the daughter of a German officer, cousin of the Red Baron and, above all, the muse and wife of D.H. Lawrence. A highly attractive seductress, she is the source of inspiration and passion for the protagonist and narrator of the novel, Joachim von Tilly.

The eleventh descendant of Count von Tilly of Hanover, Joachim seems destined to follow in his father’s footsteps at the helm of the family steelworks. But the road already mapped out for him by this constricting heritage soon turns into an escape that takes him to Naples and Capri, then Vienna, Berlin and, finally, Buenos Aires.

Joachim’s endless escape is studded with encounters, love affairs, hopes and betrayals. These lines, read by Joachim in a mysterious book discovered in Buenos Aires, perhaps suffice to summarise his adventurous life: “Man believes that his decisions extend over a large sphere of action when they actually merely sway between flight and nostalgia.”

 

A classic and at the same time very modern novel with a publishing history full of adventures. A few hundred copies of Frieda were already published in 2015 when it attracted the attention of reviewers and critics. It made the selection for the Campiello prize but had to be withdrawn because of the low print run and an insufficient number of copies to be sent to all the judges. But the press had fallen in love with it by then and there was an increasing number of reviews. Now, Ponte alle Grazie is relaunching this author with an international flavour, a kept promise of Italian literature.