The Gospel volumes

The Gospel volumes enter Giovanna’s life as a request to her father and become the focus of a private struggle over belief, suffering, and authority. Andrea promptly supplies an edition with commentary and urges her to study rather than merely read. But the books do not provide the comforting, fable-like path toward God that Giovanna had hoped to find: their accounts instead provoke fear and anger, and lead her to question the goodness of the heavenly Father as well as the conduct of earthly ones. Her reading also becomes a measure of changing attachments, as her imagined conversation with Roberto shifts from longing for his presence to a desire to become someone worthy of his respect.

The Request and Andrea’s Gift

After school, while eating panzarotti and pastacresciuta with Andrea, Giovanna says impulsively that she wants to read the Gospels. She asks whether it would be wrong to become Christian and whether she might be baptized; Andrea answers that he sees nothing wrong with either possibility. His response makes the idea feel acceptable rather than forbidden, although the exchange does not establish that Giovanna converts or seeks baptism.

There is no copy at home, but Giovanna has not reckoned with how quickly Andrea acts when she mentions a book. A few days after their conversation, he appears outside her school carrying an edition of the Gospels with commentary. He tells her that texts like these must be studied, not merely read. The annotated edition connects the books to a side of Andrea Giovanna recognizes as genuine: when he is absorbed in books, ideas, and large questions, his eyes light up. Their shared interest offers a brief form of closeness amid the damage in the family. Yet the gift also lets Andrea imagine that relations with Giovanna may be returning to normal, even as she understands that intellectual engagement helps him avoid confronting what he has done to her and her mother.

A Sacred Story That Refuses Consolation

Giovanna begins reading in hopes that the Gospels will work like fables, drawing her toward a love of God resembling Roberto’s. Instead, their realism unsettles her. The people have actual occupations and belong to recognizable places; the narratives do not lift her into reassuring fantasy. What stands out to her is their ferocity, and she grows agitated as she finishes one Gospel and begins another.

The books make divine authority feel less like protection than surveillance. Giovanna resents the idea of a Lord watching human beings choose between good and evil while they remain exposed to hunger, illness, terror, cruelty, and betrayal. She finds the relation between God the Father and his fragile creatures frightening and infuriating, and is disturbed by the story of a son who suffers and dies without receiving an answer to his cry for help. The resurrection offers no easy relief: the prospect of a mutilated body returning to life horrifies her, and eternal life among the resurrected seems to her potentially more terrible than death.

This reading unsettles the very family language through which Giovanna has been trying to understand authority. She compares the heavenly Father to an unloving father in the Gospels, one who answers a hungry child’s request for bread with stones, snakes, and scorpions. She fears that speaking openly to Andrea about this comparison would turn the discussion into an accusation against him. The books therefore do not resolve her doubts; they give them a sharp religious vocabulary and draw her sympathy toward people suffering within a harsh world, including her mother, whom she sees as having been used by Andrea and then met with flattering words.

Reading, Secrecy, and Parental Authority

When her mother asks what she is reading, Giovanna answers that she is reading the Gospels and explains that she wanted to do so. Her mother advises her not to tell Andrea, because he would want to discuss the books and spoil the experience. The warning echoes Giovanna’s own reluctance: Andrea has offered the edition and encouraged study, but she cannot imagine a frank conversation with him about what the texts have made her feel.

By the time she considers how she might answer Andrea’s questions, she has read through to the final line. She plans to respond in general terms if he quizzes her, rather than expose her actual conclusions. Meanwhile, the hoped-for conversation with Roberto becomes a private standard against which she measures herself. She imagines him far away in Milan, occupied with useful work and recognized for his merits; what she now wants is not simply his physical presence, but to reorganize herself around becoming someone he would respect. The Gospels thus connect religious inquiry to an adolescent effort to imagine a future self, even as the authority she seeks remains uncertain and difficult to question.

The Gospels in Giovanna’s Later Encounter with Roberto

Months later, Giovanna brings the Gospels into conversation with Roberto. Asked what she has read, she names them, though she presents this as an impressive answer and the reading belongs to an earlier period. In preparation for the possibility of such a moment, she has written her impressions in a notebook so that she can list them for him.

When the opportunity comes, she speaks at length while trying to keep her composure and meet Roberto’s gaze. Her anger at the texts overtakes her attention to the square, the newspaper stand, and the people around her; for that moment, Roberto is all that remains in her focus. Angela watches with pride, while Giuliana looks bewildered and appears concerned by Giovanna’s display. The episode does not show whether Roberto accepts or rejects her argument. It does show the Gospels continuing to operate beyond private reading: they provide Giovanna with material for a performance of seriousness, a way to pursue recognition, and a subject through which her fervent, unresolved thinking becomes visible to others.