Review of Per dieci minuti by Chiara Gamberale

per dieci minuti cover

This is a book about change and self-development, this is also a book that proves how much is hard to change our own life and escape our fearful mental cages. I am speaking about a book written by an Italian talented author, Chiara Gamberale, and titled Per dieci minuti.

The work is still not translated into English, but I hope it will be soon. If I should translate this book into English, I would have chosen the following title: Just for ten minutes. Ten minutes a day for a month, this is the time that a psychotherapist gives to Chiara to change her life.

Note that the main character of the book has the same name of the author. Indeed, the story is vaguely biographic because it gets the idea from the same life experiences of this young Italian writer. Chiara is a girl like many, she has a good job, writes for a famous magazine, has a husband, a successful lawyer, and they both live in the countryside, in Vicarello, just outside Rome, in a home that she inherited from her parents. When Chiara and her husband decide to move to Rome, in the big city, here is where the problems get started.

The husband leaves for Dublin and remains there forever because he met a beautiful exotic girl who loves to make pancakes. Meanwhile, at work, Chiara is replaced with a famous Italian show girl. Abruptly, in a blink of an eye, the life of Chiara falls apart, completely. Shaken and depressed, Chiara undertakes a modern psychotherapy to change her life. The psychotherapist suggests that she runs a new errand for ten minutes a day, a task she never did before. In this way, Chiara will be able to change her sad life and turn it into a new renaissance.

One day, the character cooks pancakes, other colors her nails, another does shopping along with an old friend, another listens to the troubles of her mother. All things that Chiara never did during her young life. For dieci minuti is a book to be read in one breath, writing is fluid, fun and smooth and the sorrow of the soul is always described in an enjoyable way.

This is not a book to cry, but to smile to the several troubles that sometimes occur in life and to learn overcoming them. In an eventful key, with no hint of non-fiction, the novel shows how to escape our mental schemes, those schemes that often imprison our life by making us believe that it is impossible to change.

Day by day, instead, and just doing new things, Chiara discovers back the real taste of life, but, above all, she realizes that life can be wonderful even without a husband, even during a moment of solitude, because we are our own greatest richness. If readers will understand this important meaning of the book, perhaps, after reading, they’ll feel happy again. I think it will be so.

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