The Girl at the Door

by Veronica Raimo, Stash Luczkiw (Translator)

Overview

Called “the first post-Weinstein novel” by Vanity Fair Italy, The Girl at the Door is a riveting story of lust, power, and betrayal

While on vacation on an idyllic island called Miden, a seemingly aimless woman meets an attractive man and leaves her country to be with him. A few months later, newly pregnant and just beginning to feel comfortable in her lover’s space, her life is upended when a girl arrives at the door.

Slight and pretty, the girl discloses a drawn out and violent affair she’s had with her professor, the father of the woman’s unborn child. In alternating perspectives, the professor and his girlfriend reflect upon their lives, each other, and their interloper. As the community gathers testimony and considers the case, the couple is forced to confront their own paranoia, fetishes, and transgressions in light of the student’s accusations.

Provocative and unnerving, The Girl at the Door explores the bureaucracy of a scandal, and the thin line between lust and possession. In an age in which blunt power and fickle nuance take turns upon the stage, Raimo has delivered an intoxicating exploration of the politics and power of sex.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802147349
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	10/08/2019
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	374,855
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

VERONICA RAIMO is the author of two novels published in Italy – Il dolore secondo Matteo and Tutte le feste di domani – and a collection of short stories published in Germany, Eines Tages alles dir. Veronica contributes regularly to Rolling Stone and wrote the script for Sleeping Beauty by Marco Bellocchio. She has translated from English to Italian writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Octavia Butler, Iain Sinclair, Vikram Seth, and others. She lives in Rome.

Read an Excerpt

I was in my sixth month when the girl came knocking.


I’d gotten used to visits at home, almost as if I were sick. In a certain sense I was, a languid infirmity that had me spending the days doing nothing. The doctors prescribed a lot of rest. The challenge was to find new ways of resting.


It was always the others who were coming to me. I’d learned how to re-ceive them. People passed by to ask me how I was, give me advice and bring me books on motherhood with covers so ugly I didn’t know where to hide them. If they didn’t bring me books, then they came with something to eat. At times it was something potentially toxic, so along with their kindness came a heartfelt self-reproach: “How stupid of me! Tiramsu… raw eggs! How could I not have thought about it!”


The girl came empty handed. On the threshold, her hair down, her jeans tight, just the way I used to wear before the visitors came to replenish my stock of maternity pants. I was constantly hiding stuff those days.


“Are you the professor’s wife?” the girl asked me.


“Girlfriend, um… partner,” I specified, even though it embarrassed me to use that term. It felt like I was putting on airs.


“I have to speak to you,” she said.

Editorial Reviews

The Girl at the Door, the first work by the Italian writer Raimo to be translated into English, freshens the genre…Raimo is clearly most interested in complicating our ideas about what it might mean to expunge, or even attempt to expunge, the worst impulses and elements from society.

The New York Times Book Review - John Williams

★ 08/05/2019

In Raimo’s fanged, elliptical tale, her English-language debut, sexual politics roils a tranquil utopia. A philosophy professor and his pregnant girlfriend, both unnamed, are relative newcomers to the island of Miden, an egalitarian society whose “vital serenity” is in marked contrast to their unnamed homeland, which is reeling from a devastating financial collapse. When the professor’s former student and lover declares that she had been raped and “subjected to violence” during their affair, the Commission investigates the allegations to determine whether “the Perpetrator” will be allowed to remain within their community or whether the “violence nesting in could contaminate the social fabric.” The novel is told in alternating chapters from the professor’s and his girlfriend’s perspective as the Commission sends out questionnaires to their acquaintances. The professor, a charming narcissist, finds “a wonderful perversion” in being the center of the denigrating administrative process, while his isolated girlfriend reassesses the choices that have brought her from her moribund country to this besieged paradise. The novel deals in shifting sentiments: between love, revulsion, and desire; hostility toward and identification with the accuser; and between the couple’s ironic stance toward Miden’s stifling contentment and their intense yearning for inclusion in the community. A writer of wry and lucid prose, Raimo sculpts from these ambiguities a crystalline, powerful novel. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Girl at the Door

ONE OF TRANSLATED LIT'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF OCTOBER 2019

“ [T]ight and provocative.”—Salon

“File it on the shelf with other recent masterpieces of the #MeToo era, from Sofka Zinovieff’s Putney to Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Raimo’s slim and uncomfortable novel is the opposite of a straightforward polemic . . . But THE GIRL AT THE DOOR earns its moral complexity and its refusals.”—Observer

"With questions of accusation, consent, and prevarication at its center, this unsettling novel, in turns elegant and crude, could not be more timely. Raimo not only deconstructs and upends the narrative, but also explores eternal themes of exile, identity, and belonging. An heir to Atwood and Coetzee, she is one of the most original and exciting writers in Italy today."—Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Lowland

“This uncompromising, fiercely intelligent novel confirms the moral usefulness of serious art: it reminds us that the world is more complicated than our righteous certainties; it forces us to acknowledge the abyss.”—Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

“Fierce, intelligent, candid, and erotic, Veronica Raimo has written a devastating modern fable of passion, where acts of betrayal, violence, and sex both sustain and destroy the characters’ lives in unexpected and provocative ways.”—Lily Tuck, author of Sisters

“An astonishing novel that examines moral anguish from original and captivating angles, full of quotable lines and startling insights into conscience and the urge to judge. The novel explores the limits of intimacy, physical and emotional, and is as gripping as anything I’ve read this year. Sexy, dangerous, modern – what’s not to love?”—Richard Beard, author of The Day That Went Missing

“Perfection is not such a beautiful place when you look at it too closely, and Veronica Raimo here enlightens its depths with elegant, mesmerizing and merciless writing.”—La Repubblica

“[The Girl at the Door] talks about harassment, consensus, populism and vigilantism, but also about what we feel when our actions are analyzed from outside and we become characters in someone else's narrative.”—Forbes Italia

“Raimo’s novel will enrich the debate on the most current contemporary issues and at the same time belongs to the international literary scene that today can talk about emotions, individuals and sex in the most interesting and stylistically innovative way: from Catherine Lacey to Sally Rooney.”—Vice Italy

"[The Girl at the Door] is catching and convincing. Veronica Raimo is probably the most emblematic interpreter of fiction exploring the reality of sexual harassment."—L'Espresso

"A surprising novel, as surprising is the setting where it takes place... A novel with an international appeal, we would just love to read more books like this."—Rolling Stone Italy

“In this mysterious and seductive novel, Raimo bravely gives no answers… [The Girl at the Door] is a novel about doubt: its fascination and its fear.”—La Stampa

“A world which reminds one of Disgrace by Coetzee, but here it’s a woman and her anguish at the core of everything. All our certainties collapse, and so collapses the idea we have of ourselves.”—Corriere della sera

“[R]eminiscent of The Scarlet Letter but with a more salacious vocabulary. . . . Provocative reading for the brave.”—Library Journal

"Raimo's novel brilliantly examines jealousies, sexual proclivities and gender prejudices . . . a powerful and timeless statement."—Shelf Awareness

From the Publisher

2019-07-15
In an intentional utopian community on an island, a couple deals with the consequences of a sexual accusation.

"Having an affair with a student is never a good idea," ruminates the character known only as Him in Italian author Raimo's first novel to be published in the U.S. But, he continues, "it was statistically almost impossible not to." This professor's pregnant live-in girlfriend, known as Her, has been visited by a girl carrying a letter addressed to the man they have in common. It is an official accusation of repeated rape and sexual violence occurring two years ago, resulting in "TRAUMA no. 215." The girl explains that she didn't realize she was being abused at the time. The novel's mockery of this situation is embedded in a larger sendup of politically correct culture and values, concentrated in an imaginary island called Miden. Created after "the Crash" in the unnamed home country of the protagonists (hint: they eat tiramisu and spaghetti), "the Crash had brought whole countries to their knees, whereas Miden emerged from the deep waters with the splendor of a Venus." Miden is organized by Commissions, in which everyone must participate; both protagonists belong to Organic Pesticides. Diminutives and pet names have been outlawed to prevent women "from being harangued in an untoward or debasing way," and since dressing in layers is required by law, most women wear "handmade raw wool sweaters in Miden colors." When some audacious students print up white T-shirts with the slogan "WE'RE ALL PERPETRATORS," these are soon joined by "WE ARE ALL TREES," "WE ARE ALL OBLIQUE," and "WE ARE ALL CHAIRS." As the professor's friends and associates submit questionnaires to be used at his trial, the couple suffers under the strain. A flowered orange poncho given her by a chromotherapist friend doesn't help the pregnant woman, whose insomnia has become "almost ideological." The verdict looms.

An unusual, witty, provocatively anti-doctrinaire fable.

Kirkus Reviews

10/11/2019

In her English-language debut, Italian author Raimo creates an uncomfortable situation for her readers to consider—the report of an act of sexual violence within a utopian society where the principles of morality are unyielding. The island of Miden is a beautiful, peaceful place, thanks to its natural beauty and to the Commission, which makes sure the area's inhabitants live in accordance with the Miden Dream. When a professor of philosophy is accused of rape, testimonies are collected for his trial. The verdict of the trial will determine whether the professor will be allowed to stay on the island. The story is told in alternating voices of Him (the professor) and Her (his girlfriend, who is pregnant with their first child). The accuser is a student with whom he had an affair two years ago, before the girlfriend came to live at Miden. Following the affair, the student came to believe that she was victimized by the older man, and she presses charges. VERDICT In a story reminiscent of The Scarlet Letter but with a more salacious vocabulary, emotional polarities abound while the accused expresses no remorse, only self-interest. Provocative reading for the brave. [See Prepub Alert, 2/4/19.]—Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L.

Library Journal

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