Education is the way out of poverty. That’s how generations have internalized it. But that has now become an empty promise, as Gaia painfully learns from the novel The Water of the Lake Is Never Sweet.
There are infinitely many heroes and heroines in novels who immediately win you over, with whom you would most like to be friends. And then there are the less sympathetic characters, who the readers can no longer get out of their heads because they are disturbing and stirring. The Italian author Giulia Caminito tells of such a protagonist in her novel “The water of the lake is never sweet”. The main character’s name is Gaia, which means “the happy one”. But Gaia is anything but that.
The first-person narrator grew up with three siblings as the daughter of poor parents in Italy in the noughties. She is ashamed of the conditions in which she lives, of the family’s deprivation, and describes herself as “the girl with her mother’s hair cut who wears her anarchist brother’s clothes”. The father has been paralyzed from the waist down since a fall on the construction site where he was illegally working. The mother does the cleaning and tries to keep the family together as resolutely and ruthlessly as possible. Already in the first chapter, Caminito lets Gaia say harsh words about the mother: “I judge her and do not forgive her.”
Even in the company of her friends without money worries, Gaia feels rather uncomfortable and not really belonging: “They feel sorry for my neediness or enjoy it because giving gives them a feeling of superiority.” Only once does Gaia show her home and her room to one girl, in which sits a giant pink plush bear that she won by shooting at the fair.
At the beginning the family lives in a seedy area of Rome, in a five by four meter small basement room with a concrete floor and mold, which the mother has previously cleaned of cockroaches, mice and syringes. They later move into social housing in Anguillara Sabazia, 30 kilometers from Rome on Lago di Bracciano – a place that lives on legends: a nativity scene is said to have sunk under the mole and a city in the middle of the lake. And the water isn’t sweet either, but “tastes like petrol, if you hold a lighter to it, it bursts into flames”.
A subliminal explosiveness also runs through the entire book, which accompanies Gaia during her youth with first falls in love, disappointments, betrayal and loss. Caminito chooses a harsh language rich in images – fabulously translated into German by Barbara Kleiner – and makes the silent anger of her protagonist palpable on every page. And that repeatedly turns into brutality, which Gaia describes as a “new superpower”. She uses fists and burns cars. When a boy at school really gets to her, she smashes his knee with a tennis racket.
Bullying at school is everyday life for Gaia. Every day she commutes from Anguillara Sabazia by train to Rome, to a high school in an affluent area. While the other students there are sporting Gucci bags, Gaia is still using her middle school backpack. There is a reason why she chose the humanistic high school: “I tell myself I would have done it because of my friends, they go there and so do I, but the truth is that I carry a very, very tiny little thing inside me , an acorn, an insect, and that’s my mother’s voice, to whom I have to prove that I’m worth something.”
Because the mother, who was denied an education, has great expectations of her daughter. She should “shine, go to university, become a doctor, an engineer, get into finance, publish novels and above all read, obsessively and relentlessly.” And so Gaia learns, learns, learns and learns. She passed her A-levels with top marks, but her teacher suggested that she quickly look for a job, for example in a supermarket, “with a family like mine it makes sense”. Gaia goes to college out of defiance and learns that talent and hard work just aren’t enough to escape her origins.
With the vulnerable and hurtful Gaia, Caminito portrays the radical representative of a disillusioned generation for which the promise that education is a way out of poor conditions no longer applies. In Italy, where youth unemployment is currently at almost 25 percent, the novel struck a chord. “The water of the lake is never sweet” stormed the bestseller lists when it was published and won several important awards.
Although she shares some similarities with Gaia, the book is “not a biography, not an autobiography, and not an autofiction, it’s a story that has incorporated fragments of many lives,” writes Caminito in an afterword. Like her protagonist, the author, who was born in 1988, grew up on Lago di Bracciano. And she studied philosophy, the subject that Gaia is also enrolling in, is getting an excellent degree and is hoping for a PhD position. But without vitamin B: no chance. What’s next for Gaia? In the end, that remains open.