The Breaking of a Wave is a persistently charming and lovely book. Set in a small Tuscan seaside town and featuring a cast of quirky yet believable and affectionately realised characters, it’s a book that somehow manages to be gentle at the same time as emotionally affecting.
Told from a selection of different perspectives, Genovesi’s novel gradually builds up to the tragic death of one of the town’s young inhabitants, and the slow start creates a false sense of security. Even through this turning point is made clear in the blurb, the cosiness of the opening chapters leaves the reader wondering whether such a devastating event is even possible. Building such a sense of complacency in the reader is a really effective way to ensure our feelings of shock and grief echo those of young Luca’s mother and sister, Luna, from whose perspectives so much of the novel is relayed. Luna is a delightful character; accustomed to outsider status due her albinism, she’s nevertheless an endearingly optimistic presence, and her friendship with Zot, a strange boy adopted from Chernobyl, gives The Breaking of a Wave much of its heart. Child narrators can so often be excessively, cloyingly sweet or downright irritating, but Luna’s narrative is satisfying nuanced, showing the growing up she’s forced to do after losing her brother.
I particularly liked the way in which Genovesi created a really strong image of the town of Forte dei Marmi, with its resident misfits and their deftly drawn backgrounds. Veering from Luna’s first person narrative, to the narrator directly addressing her mother, to the more conventional third person chapters concerning the town’s other inhabitants, it’s slightly confusing to begin with, but the varying voices become easily identifiable once a few chapters have been spent in the company of these characters. I enjoyed the vignettes that explored the suspended adulthood of Sandro and his fellow forty-somethings, still living with their parents and engaging in the kind of childish antics which even thirteen-year-old Luna would eschew. There’s a particularly charming subplot involving a freakishly large mushroom which will keep making me smile long after finishing the book.
Overall, The Breaking of a Wave offers a satisfying combination of innocent youth and weary maturity, as well as neatly juxtaposing whimsical humour with domestic tragedy. Genovesi pulls of this balancing act with aplomb, making this novel something to really treasure.
