CHI DICE E CHI TACE

A gulf with a soft line, a long sandy beach that runs parallel to the Appian Way between two hills, Monte d'Oro and Monte d'Argento. A seafront full of oleanders punctuated by colorful and sometimes faded establishments, each different from the other: the Tintarella, the Lido Delfini, the Lido del Pino, the Lido Maria, and many others. And then the Lu Rusticone pizzeria, the Luccioletta bar, two churches, one real square. A little further south the Garigliano river flows and Campania begins. Immediately to the north there are Formia, Gaeta, Sperlonga; in less than two hours you arrive in Naples and Rome.
Scauri, in Lazio, on the Tyrrhenian Sea, six thousand residents in the winter months and one hundred thousand in the summer months. A country neither beautiful nor ugly, but with its own decomposed grace. This is where Vittoria chose to live and died in her bathtub. It was a stupid accident.
Lawyer Lea Russo, a husband and two daughters, has always been fascinated by Vittoria. She is a distant but curious, welcoming and evasive woman; in speaking she has a fatalism that leaves you dismayed. She had arrived in Scauri with her laugh that started low and ended high, she had bought a house where everyone could come and go, she had never argued with anyone, she had never changed her hair cut. She lived with Mara, perhaps she had adopted her, perhaps she had kidnapped her, many things were said. Now Vittoria has died from a stupid accident in a bathtub, and Lea Russo isn't convinced. Lea no longer wants to settle for what she has always had before her eyes. She wants to understand how Vittoria died, and who she really was.
Chiara Valerio's first novel for Sellerio marks an unprecedented narrative trajectory. Black story of characters, investigation of an unusual province, portrait of constantly changing women. Nothing is still, in Who says and who is silent , the emotions, the loves, the truths and the enigmas, the silences of the present and the din of memory: everything moves, everything transforms, everything can always change.