Lanza tu pan

Two sleepless nights separated by several years; two distinct vigils in a woman's life. Intense, caffeinated, sharp, each a potent crucible of reminiscences and aspirations, brimming with both past and future, they reveal Christine Grave to us. In the first, immobile in her bed for fear of waking her ailing mother, who sleeps in the next room, she revisits scenes from her daily life and confronts her anxieties. She longs to write, she has yearned for it for years, knowing it was her destiny, both cherishing and dreading it. However, living with her mother has established a kind of servitude, a moral blackmail that leaves her with no time, no strength, no expectations: she is the perfect embodiment of that unmarried daughter who must care for her elders. Decades have passed in a delicate power struggle in which Christine tried to assert her independence, her dedication to her work, her rejection of motherhood, and her reconciliation with solitude; But her mother's illness shatters her aspirations. Even so, life is always more complex than it seems, for emotional dependence, secrets, and half-truths are inseparable from the unwavering complicity between them and their mutual wit. Alice Rivaz handles this incendiary material to, through the intimacy between the two, portray not only Christine but also her mother, a demanding and sometimes even tyrannical woman who represents an entire era, a society, with vanished habits and customs, which the author describes with admirable precision and humor. On the second night, now retired and after the death of the woman who had occupied her days, Christine confronts the meaning of existence. Writing, that secret dream, looms over her. What to do with all those drafts piled up in her trunk like the mending she treasured in hers? Will she finally pick up her pen?