Giulia Caminito’s English-language debut arrives like a stone dropped into still water—the ripples spread slowly at first, then with devastating force. The Lake’s Water Is Never Sweet presents itself as a coming-of-age story, but beneath its deceptively calm surface lurks something far more unsettling: a meditation on how poverty, displacement, and betrayal can transform adolescent vulnerability into something approaching vengeance.
The Architecture of Displacement
Set against the backdrop of 1990s Italy, Caminito constructs her narrative around the Colombo family’s migration from Rome’s neglected peripheries to the ostensibly idyllic lakeside town of Anguillara Sabazia. This geographical transition serves as more than mere setting—it becomes the novel’s central metaphor for the impossibility of true escape from one’s circumstances. Gaia, our narrator, observes this relocation with the sharp-eyed clarity that only teenage disappointment can provide.
The family arrives carrying their particular catalog of damage: Antonia, the fierce red-haired mother whose determination borders on delusion; Massimo, the father rendered powerless by an industrial accident that serves as shorthand for systemic neglect; Mariano, the anarchist older brother whose political fury mirrors his family’s domestic rage; and the twin brothers who serve as silent witnesses to their family’s slow disintegration.
Caminito’s greatest achievement lies in her refusal to sentimentalize poverty. The basement apartment in Rome isn’t depicted as romantically bohemian suffering—it’s moldy, rat-infested, and genuinely dangerous. When Antonia secures their lakeside house through questionable means, the move represents not triumph but lateral displacement, trading one form of marginalization for another.
The Poison of Adolescent Friendship
The novel’s most psychologically acute sections concern Gaia’s toxic friendship with Agata and Carlotta. These relationships, formed out of necessity rather than genuine affection, provide Caminito with her richest material for exploring the particular cruelties of teenage social dynamics. The author captures with uncomfortable precision the way adolescent friendships can become exercises in mutual surveillance and subtle humiliation.
Key dynamics that emerge:
- Class consciousness disguised as personal preference – when Carlotta criticizes Gaia’s brother’s green sweatshirt, calling it “green like a marker,” the attack targets not fashion but poverty
- The weaponization of secrets – the girls’ revelation of intimate fears becomes a form of social currency
- Exclusion as social control – Gaia’s deliberate ostracization of Carlotta following the pool incident demonstrates how quickly victim becomes perpetrator
The friendship’s trajectory from intimacy to betrayal to tragedy follows a logic that feels both inevitable and shocking. Caminito refuses to provide easy explanations for Carlotta’s eventual suicide, instead allowing it to stand as an indictment of a social system that offers young women few options beyond compliance or self-destruction.
Prose Style: The Language of Simmering Rage
Caminito’s prose operates through a technique of controlled accumulation. Sentences build with meticulous detail before releasing their emotional payload in devastating final clauses. Consider this description of Gaia’s awareness of her family’s marginalization: “I feel like we’re scrap material, useless cards in a complicated game, chipped marbles that no longer roll—we’re left motionless on the ground, like my father, who fell from inadequate scaffolding at an illegal construction site.”
The lake itself functions as the novel’s most potent symbol—neither the pristine escape promised by tourism brochures nor simply a body of water, but something more ambiguous. The recurring image of the submerged nativity scene suggests both hidden spiritual possibility and the way sacred narratives become distorted when viewed through the lens of economic desperation.
Hope Campbell Gustafson’s translation deserves particular recognition for maintaining the novel’s distinctive rhythm while making its specifically Italian social dynamics accessible to English-language readers. The prose maintains its original’s sense of barely contained fury without losing the observational precision that makes Gaia’s narration so compelling.
Where the Novel Falters
Despite its considerable strengths, The Lake’s Water Is Never Sweet occasionally succumbs to the very tendency it critiques in other characters—the urge to make grand pronouncements about social injustice. Some of Mariano’s political speeches feel more like authorial position statements than organic character development. The novel’s final act, with its symbolic flooding, risks pushing metaphor into melodrama.
Additionally, while Caminito excels at depicting the psychological texture of female adolescence, some male characters remain frustratingly opaque. Massimo’s transformation from “savage” patriarch to broken dependant is sketched rather than fully developed, leaving readers to fill in emotional gaps the narrative doesn’t quite bridge.
The Literary Landscape: Positioning Caminito
Caminito emerges from a rich tradition of Italian writers examining class and social mobility, yet her voice possesses distinctive qualities that set her apart from immediate comparisons. While critics have inevitably mentioned Elena Ferrante, Caminito’s approach differs significantly—where Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels span decades to show how friendship endures despite transformation, Caminito focuses intensely on the moment when friendship curdles into something toxic.
Her previous work, including The Big A which won multiple Italian literary prizes, established her as a chronicler of marginalized experiences. The Lake’s Water Is Never Sweet represents both a continuation of these themes and a significant artistic maturation.
Similar Literary Explorations
Readers drawn to Caminito’s unflinching examination of adolescent social dynamics might find resonance in:
- Annie Ernaux’s The Years – for its sociological precision in depicting class mobility
- Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy – for similarly controlled prose that conceals emotional devastation
- Jenny Offill’s Weather – for its fragmented approach to contemporary anxiety
- Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life – for its exploration of how childhood trauma shapes adult relationships
- Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend – for its Italian context and female friendship dynamics, though with crucial differences in scope and tone
Final Assessment: The Sweetness of Bitter Truth
The Lake’s Water Is Never Sweet succeeds because it refuses to offer easy consolations. Gaia’s final act of flooding her family’s house reads not as madness but as the logical endpoint of a life spent watching water flow toward those who already have enough. The novel’s title proves prophetic—this water was never meant to refresh, only to reveal what lies beneath seemingly placid surfaces.
Caminito has written a novel that honors the complexity of its young protagonist’s rage without excusing it, that critiques social systems without resorting to polemic, and that finds genuine poetry in the landscape of contemporary disillusionment. It’s a book that lingers long after its final page, like the taste of lake water—neither sweet nor entirely bitter, but unmistakably real.
For readers seeking literature that grapples seriously with how economic inequality shapes emotional development, The Lake’s Water Is Never Sweet offers both artistic achievement and social insight. It confirms Caminito as a significant voice in contemporary Italian literature and announces her arrival as a writer capable of speaking to international audiences about the universal experience of feeling perpetually displaced in one’s own life.
