FOLLOW YOUR HEART by Susanna Tamaro,...

FOLLOW YOUR HEART by Susanna Tamaro, translated from the Italian by John Cullen (Dell/Delta: $9.95, 204 pp.). A bestseller in both Europe and America, Tamaro’s novel takes the form of a letter from an 80-year-old Italian woman to her estranged granddaughter in America. Sensing that the approaching winter will bring her death, the narrator composes her apologia: “Now that I’ve lived so long and left so many people behind, I know that the absence of the dead doesn’t weigh on us as heavily as the words that were left unsaid between us when they died.” Cullen’s sensitive translation conveys the intimacy of an aging heart confiding the key events in her own life, including the troubled relationship with her unstable daughter.