For me, this book was too ambitious. It had plenty of poignant ideas and events to cover: the rise of Fascism and its impact in a German-speaking part of Italy, a pleasant enough love story between people with different approaches to life and levels of education, the decision to submerge a village before WWII to make room for a damn, a hydroelectric power plant, and an artificial lake, and the final completion of the project well after the end of the war and the collapse of the regime.
Yet, by trying to do all of it in a short novel, the author doesn't really do justice to any of those things: the condemnation of Fascism and its linguistic policies feels little more than a mild tirade, I didn't really care about the individual characters, and I was quite willing to chalk the creation of the artificial lake to "ah, that's progress, it had to happen"...
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