Free Day by Ines Cagnati

Me, I've never been able to love anything, because nobody wanted me. I know that my mother didn't have time to look after me, what with the field work, the livestock, my father, Maria and the other babies that never stopped coming, and after that, Aunt Gina's romance novels. I don't miss the caresses I never had. They horrify me. Even right now, if someone brought a damp mouth to me for a kiss I would slap them hard, I'd be so horrified. Except for my mother. She's my mother. And Fanny. She has smooth, freckled cheeks, like warm bread. She's so pretty. If I'd been loved, I'd be pretty, too. It would have been enough for me to be a puppy or any kind of domestic animal. My father and mother take good care of animals. As for me, when I was little, I would have liked to be a little calf. I would have been loved, like everybody.

Galla, the protagonist of Ines Cagnati's Free Day, takes an extra holiday off from boarding school to travel home on her loyal bicycle. But when she arrives, her father takes one look at her and tells her to go away. So begins the titular "free day": one in which Galla wanders around the outskirts of her home, waiting for her mother to come out, cuddling with her dog, Daisy, and exploring the familiar--but loathed--marshes around her house.

Galla's free day is an opportunity to reflect on her place in the world: the favorite of her always-pregnant mother, she is the oldest of her many sisters. Their land is poor, and they live in deep poverty, yet Galla has managed to convince her mother to send her to the high school in the city. She is despised by the other students, who look down on her for wearing the wrong color smock--she can't afford any other--and by her teachers, who consider her rude and a troublemaker. (Only Fanny, of the warm bread cheeks, is a beacon among them.) And though Galla seems to despise the inanity of school, and her mother deeply needs her at home to help look after the smallest children, including tiny blind Antonella, Galla insists on doing to school because she senses, it seems, that school is the way to get out of the foggy and noxious marshes, and the cycle of poverty in which her family is trapped.

Galla is ambitious, then, but she is also cynical and full of self-loathing. She spends much of her free day thinking about how she'd prefer to die: lost at sea, so that she might sink to the bottom and never be found. Violent fantasies are informed by a life punctuated with violence: at successive steps along the marsh, Galla is reminded of her how her father hangs their dogs, or the car crash she caused which caused a little girl to lose half her face, or the death of her beloved younger sister Cendrine, who was hooked by a cow and launched into a field (!). Does such violence ever touch the other girls at the high school? Or is it only the property of the poor? In her foreword, translator Liesl Schillinger describes how Free Day is inspired by Cagnati's experiences as the child of Italian immigrants brought into France for poor labor. It's a book about the experience--troubling, even dangerous--of being an outsider.

Galla's voice is what really makes Free Day so engaging from the very beginning. Simple, like a young girl's voice, but full of weary wisdom, and a strange mix of self-hatred and bold defiance. It works so well, is so endearing and so chilling, that it propels the book foreword even though, properly speaking, hardly anything happens: just a girl wandering around the marshes, thinking about her life.