We'll start by relating excerpts from the dust jacket of the hardback of Simona Vinci's What We Don't Know about Children:
In a suburb of Bologna, three boys and two girls--ranging in age from ten to fifteen--enter the season of long summer days [...] There, in an abandoned shack, they discover the excitement of being part of a group with its own rules and secrets. Normal kids who Rollerblade and play the same video games and Oasis and Alanis Morissette CDs that kids play everywhere [...]Tiring of familiar childish pastimes, these five ride bikes or scooters out to their clubhouse and awkwardly begin their sexual initiation, liberated by innocence and driven by natural curiosity [...]
Here are some examples from the text of the (pre) teen sexual initiations and liberated innocence:
There was a Kissing Game where: "The little girls took turns sitting behind the fence and the boys would line up on the other side. One at a time, the boys would have to undergo an examination by the princess of the day. If they passed, they would receive a kiss, sometimes they'd even get a little tongue.
Martina, who had "just turned 10" "fell a little in love" with Paolo, Mirko's 19-year-old brother. "Paolo liked Martina too. [But] [h]e had said to her, "When your tits grow ..."
After looking at pictures of "erect penises" in a pornographic magazine, Martina got "[...] a familiar wet tremble between her legs, a shiver, that she had been feeling at night in her bed for a long time, her books and dolls around her---she didn't know what it was. A sweet shiver. Powerful. Fast. All she had to do was pass her fingers over that little place, quickly, and it exploded."
Just like Missy in Netflix's Big Mouth, Martina is subsequently caught masturbating at her elementary school where, just like a scene out of Sharon Lamb's The Secret Life of Girls, Martina plays the Look at Underwear game in the girls' bathroom at recess. "It worked like this: each girl in turn would go into the middle of the circle and lift her skirt or pull down her trousers to show the others her panties."
"Later, inside the shed, Martina wrapped her lips around [10-year-old] Matteo's penis. It was different from Mirko's. Small, tender, like a finger without any bones. Spongy. Dry. She caressed it with the tip of her tongue [...]"
"The first time Martina took [15-year-old] Mirko in her hand, a peculiar sensation came over her. His thing---soft and hard at the same time, sticky and hot [...] She immediately started moving her hand back and forth over the loose skin, easily, without thinking about it."
"[...] Mirko touch[ed] Greta [a 5th grader] with the tip of his tongue, licking her up her thighs, higher, pushing her panties aside."
Unsurprisingly, Martina and Greta lost their virginities and they participated in lipstick lesbian activities while the boys watched. But surprisingly, there was anal sex involved in the (pre) teen's sexual initiations.
"In the beginning, they used a toothbrush. The round handle of a pink Hello Kitty toothbrush [...] It was easy, like with a thermometer. The tender circle of minuscule pink wrinkles opened right up; the little girl [Greta] laughed and said that was how the doctor used to take her temperature [...] She lay still, on her stomach, naked, her legs slightly parted. Everyone crowded around her bottom [...]"
Eventually, they moved on to larger objects: "Greta screamed when the [tennis] racket handle went in, forcing, ripping the opening. But her screams was lost in the mattress."
 |
| Simona Vinci |
What We Don't Know about Children was a best-seller in Italy, the novel was awarded the prestigious Elsa Morante Prize, and it was translated from Italian into eight languages.
The Independent opined of What We Don't Know about Children: "In an astonishing tour de force for so young a writer, Vinci fulfills one of the most difficult tasks of literature: to bring out the monsters which lurk inside us all and, in doing so, help us to control them [...]"
And Vinci wrote in the author's note: "The characters and plot of this novel are imaginary, but plausible."
No comments:
Post a Comment