If we listen carefully though, we realize that this book is much more than a commemoration. Here, the garden of Eden is actually a garden of torture. The tone is never elegiac but brutally lucid, haunting. The fact is, I believe, that instead of looking into a distant mirror from the outside, the author has successfully performed the delicate operation of stepping inside it, of rummaging around in it at the risk of cutting and injuring herself on fragments of her old shell. In the young Gabriella, she has created a remarkable character, a child-adult. She is seeing things for the first time and hearing the crudest remarks while she talks to the animals and plants with the same ingenuity as characters in fairy-tales. And her gaze, which is at once fixed, strained, nearly harsh, gives the impression that in reality, nothing seems truly new to her, and that knowledge of life and suffering does not come to her from the outside but is an atavism, bitter knowledge that reappears in the bones and in the flesh.