Carmela Circelli’s ‘Love and Rain’ is a gorgeous novel, so much so that critiquing it from a literary point of view feels like violating its beauty. Circelli has packed and unpacked much in this novel—history, entangled relationships, human fragility, love and relationships, beauty and resilience.

Somehow, it feels like reading John Fowles’s novel ‘The French Liuetenant’s Woman’. Sarah's sheer beauty, resilience, and vulnerability in Fowles's book and Mara in Circelli’s novel are hard to overlook. Still, this entanglement is an emotion, not something tangible and understandable in words.

A good response to this novel would be a poem, something that all lovers of love and literature can relate to in their peculiar ways. This is not to romanticise the “sadness” these two characters feel. On the contrary, it's about the beauty of resilience that surpasses every otherworldly experience.

Even though it’s hard to categorise, this novel is not about romantic love nor about failed relationships. That kind of realism is never a personal preference for me.

One of the most intriguing questions that the novel evokes is betrayal. Is betrayal an absence of love, or is it possible for betrayal to exist alongside love? There are no concrete answers to this age-old question, but the contradiction remains an oxymoron, no matter what. Love and betrayal might have the ability to co-exist together, but the violence of betrayal can never be fixed by love.

The novel begins with the world of Chiara, a young woman in her thirties who is grieving over the loss of her relationship with her boyfriend, Daniel. But this is not just that—it feels like she is grieving for all her ancestors, and as if she can feel the pain of separation in her bones.

It is not just the separation from Daniel that is bothering her; she feels an unfamiliar pain in her bones as if an entire history is stored in them. Chiara, a professional philosopher, is not interested in the professionalism of philosophy, so she leaves the academic world behind and starts working in a flower shop. That’s where she unravels the history of her lost mother, her lost love, and the betrayal her mother endured at the hands of her father.

At the backdrop is the political movement and the resistance that is labelled as terrorism. The question of who is a terrorist has become a crucial question. When Chiara learns about her family history, her mother and her roots, she comprehends her pain in a better way. She realises how she relied on sex to feel connected to a lover, even though she remained disconnected throughout the relationship.

The narrative structure moves back and forth, and we get to know about Mara and her sister later in the novel in the form of letters that Paolo hands over to Chiara. She realises that it is only by making peace with your pain that people can move ahead in all the lives they might have.

The backdrop of the sea is deeply saddening, as much as it is inevitable. The intersection of life and death lies there. The sea is always lively, even during the moments of death elsewhere. Mara’s silence was a response to her lover’s betrayal. And during her moments of silence, she conversed only with the sea.

Her silence was for her fellow humans, but she found a way to speak to nature. Mara and the sea both have been betrayed by humans and they both resist in their way. This nature-woman connection encapsulated against the backdrop of love, betrayal, and resistance makes it a highly intense read.

“I was sure Mara could hear the world even from our shore. Its grief and laments hounded her, pushing her, always, further in. At least that's what I imagined, I imagined that she was done with whatever it was that had happened to her, done with the inevitable harm humans cause each other, done with the indifference of the fates, their tangled weave of beauty and horror. She wanted none of it. She wanted to drown it out. She wanted to wash it away. In this, the sea was her only ally, smashing and clearing. In this, even I was an adversary, and love, a fractured thing she had discarded” (190).

Even though much has been said about love and heartbreaks, the real intensity of love and the pain of betrayal can never be captured by words. Circelli, that way, presents us with a highly complex and delicate character through the character of Mara. Mara doesn’t just respond to the pain of betrayal but also to the beauty of resilience and dignity.

But the novel is not just a quest for a lost mother or lost love. It is about nations betraying their own people and people betraying the land that they call home. The violence of betrayal surpasses the power of love.

Fathima is an assistant professor of English at Jyoti Nivas College, Bangalore.

Love and Rain

Author: Carmela Circelli

Publisher: Guernica Editions

Year: 2023