Synopsis

You stop being a child when you embark on the career of a parent. Yet never more than in that moment do you need your mother: to know how to become one yourself, or perhaps more simply to avoid feeling too alone. And if your mother is no longer there because death has removed her card from the deck, breaking away from childhood to raise three children becomes an adventure. Set between the Versilia of the 1980s and 1990s, Krakow, and Berlin, It's Not True That We Weren't Happy recounts, with rare emotional incandescence but also with playful poetry, a chaotic apprenticeship. What the protagonist stages is a sort of small circus that travels around Europe: she has two dogs (two Hungarian pointers) and three children, named Gauguin, Scoiattola, and Caravaggio. There's no set schedule; every evening they improvise. She—who writes to her mother, unable to speak to her—is tasked with choosing the location and setting up the tent. Above all, she has to perform the most daring magic trick: convincing children that the world is a beautiful place, despite the nostalgia that torments her heart. Heimat, the Germans say, is the place where one comes from and where one will always belong. It is that place that, traveling from country to country and language to language, the small community in this novel has chosen as the north of its compass. Only to realize, quite simply, that geography doesn't provide the answer. Heimat is the mother: there is no other original origin, and therefore no other possible destination.