Adele and Marina's mother-daughter relationship

Adele and Marina’s mother-daughter relationship is marked by the instability of Marina’s illness and the long consequences of a family breaking apart. Their bond is neither erased by separation nor made simple by reunion: Adele continues to bring Miraijin to see her hospitalized mother, and after Adele’s death Marco takes over that care, turning the child into the living connection through which mother and daughter—and eventually the former spouses—remain linked.

A Bond Formed Under Strain

Adele grew up amid upheaval between Italy and Germany, with a mother whose psychological illness made family life precarious. Marco later recalls Adele as having been traumatized and repeatedly displaced, while Marina’s condition could involve depression, self-harm, aggression, and addiction. The account does not reduce Adele to that history: she becomes conscientious and capable, and Marco recognizes that her childhood required her to navigate dangers her parents had failed to understand.

The family’s division shaped the meaning of closeness. Marco describes his daughter’s thread-related disturbance as appearing when danger went unrecognized and receding when her parents began to understand her; during the crisis in Munich, the thread returned and became an inextricable web. In his retrospective account, Adele’s unusual perception functioned as a kind of hard-won wisdom that guided her family toward what she understood as the lesser harm. Her relationship with Marina therefore belongs to a history of both attachment and vulnerability, rather than to an uncomplicated maternal home.

Distance, Care, and Contact

Marina’s illness eventually led to her hospitalization in Germany. When Marco discusses his former wife with Dr. Carradori, he says he does not know what to do about Adele’s mother and acknowledges that Marina is unwell. Adele nevertheless maintained contact: in later years she took Miraijin with her on summer visits to see Marina at the clinic. Marco reports that Marina seemed to benefit greatly from meeting her granddaughter, and Adele planned to bring the child more often, including a visit at Christmas in Germany.

That decision gives Adele’s care a distinct direction. She does not simply resume a conventional mother-daughter relationship or repair the past through explanation; instead, she sustains contact through visits and through the presence of her child. The evidence presents this continuing connection as meaningful to Marina, whose condition was expressed in apparent indifference to stimuli. Adele’s visits brought a relationship into that impaired emotional world, even though the account does not claim that they cured her illness.

Adele’s Death and the Transfer of Care

Adele’s death abruptly changes who can maintain the relationship. Marco had not yet told Marina what happened. He explains to Dr. Carradori that Marina had been expecting to see Adele and Miraijin, and that he would have to tell her that her daughter was dead. He is reluctant to deliver the news, saying that Marina had hurt him but had also suffered greatly; he understands that Adele’s death could be devastating for her as well.

Carradori takes on the task of informing Marina, traveling to the clinic in Upper Bavaria. In doing so, he recovers the trust he had once had with her and helps move her from the apparent indifference associated with her illness. His intervention also establishes mutual pity as the survivors’ prevailing response. The tragedy, which might have deepened their separation, instead creates a basis for contact between Marina and Marco after their relationship had been broken for years.

Miraijin as a Continuing Link

After Adele’s death, Marco and Marina begin seeing one another again in the name of their granddaughter. Marco periodically travels with Miraijin to Germany, brings her to Marina’s clinic, and stays with them and Marina’s other daughter, Greta, in the room or garden. They sometimes go together for walks in a nearby park. The ordinary shape of these visits matters: the connection is sustained through presence and shared time rather than through a claim that the past has been repaired.

Marco’s feelings toward Marina have changed. He says he no longer feels anything bad toward his former wife, only pity for the minimal life she leads and for the state of having lost a child that they now share. The relationship between mother and daughter is thus carried forward by the people who survive them: Marina receives visits from the child Adele loved, while Marco assumes the task Adele had performed with perseverance and tenderness. Their renewed contact does not undo Adele’s death, but it gives the family’s remaining members a way to remain connected through it.

Significance in the Family Story

The novel places this relationship within a larger pattern in which tragedy can either scatter a family or draw surviving members together. Before Adele’s death, the Carrera family’s center was already broken: Marco and Giacomo could not speak, and Marina lived in a clinic in Germany. The death therefore reaches a family that is already divided, but its consequence differs from the earlier family rupture: shared loss brings Marco and Marina back into contact rather than producing another separation.

Adele’s bond with Marina persists through an act of care that she had chosen to continue despite the history of illness and distance. Afterward, Marco’s visits with Miraijin inherit that task. The relationship remains painful and constrained by Marina’s condition and Adele’s absence, yet it is not merely a record of damage: the granddaughter’s presence gives mother and daughter a continuing connection, and gives the bereaved adults a practical form of mutual care.