This could've been great, but instead it was about men 😔

The title refers to a list of simple things that lead to a happy life Camilla and her sister wrote before Sara died. Cute idea, unfortunately, finding the list as an adult didn't strike me as impactful enough to serve as a catalyst to the story. If you introduce something like this, even separating the book into different parts titled after items in the list, you have to commit to it. To me, it felt like a clunky way to guide the narration when there was no discernible plot to do the job. For most of the ten items, Camilla didn't seem to really change anything about her life, at least consciously enough to make the constant references to and musings about this list blend into the story.

La lista delle cose semplici is supposed to be a story about a woman who, after losing her twin sister as a child, tries to find meaning in life again. However, most of Camilla's character arc centered around which man she would most like to cheat on her boyfriend with. I get that her relationship and views on romantic love showed how cynical she had grown up to be, but, like. Someone free this woman from the shackles of hetero-/amato-normativity. There were some interesting points to be made about the protagonist growing up in a very Catholic household and being taught an extremely conservative image what a family, and her life as a woman in her thirties, was supposed to look like. Unfortunately, the novel failed to successfully challenge any of these ideas and even her complicated relationship with her parents, especially her father, seemed to be resolved without any actual growth happening on either side.

There were some other minor comments that made me cringe, like the continued obsession with the weight of various characters, and Camilla's tendency to judge literal strangers by the way they look (e.g. saying a woman probably subscribes to a man-free lifestyle because of the way she dresses).

The writing was beautiful in the parts that talked about grief; I think my favorite scene was a graveyard visit. However, they were few of those, and there were many parts were the prose felt clunky even to my non-native speaker brain. I especially loathed the pop culture references. At first I thought I just noticed them more because, not growing up in Italy, I didn't understand them and thus they stood out to me, but no. There were so many. Some I understood, some I didn't, all of them were unnecessary. I think saying a character looks like a mix of celebrity A and celebrity B instead of properly describing them is lazy writing. It doesn't actually matter what they look like! What matters it how their appearance characterizes them, and how the protagonist's subjective perception of that characterizes her. What am I supposed to do with the info that someone looks like some random celebrity I don't know or don't care about? Tell me how they hold themselves, if they put thought into their outfits, if they took time to brush their hair this morning! And if the point was to show how in tune Camilla is with pop culture, I genuinely don't know how that affected the story.

Speaking of pop culture references and lazy writing, I need to share my newest huge pet peeve in books: quoting songs. No. Just. No. I think it's incredibly lazy to borrow other people's art to invoke a specific feeling in the reader. The author is supposed to do that with their own writing! I don't need to be told that Fast Car is a great song, I know that!! I also have a lot of feelings about it, but it's your job as an author to make me feel those feelings with your own words!!! The worst part is that it doesn't happen only once, but with two different songs. Both scenes are big turning points for our main character, and both times several lines of the songs are repeatedly quoted. It seemed like a low-effort attempt to explain Camilla's emotional development and I hated every second of it.

At least I now know that my Italian is good enough to truly hate a book.