The entire oeuvre of Marco Lodoli sheds light on people on the margins and ordinary lives. Since his appearance in the Éditions P.O.L catalog in 1987 with Chronicle of a Fleeing Centurythe Roman writer has tirelessly explored cracks and vacillations, playing with reality and unreality. We had already found him admirable portraitist of women with the three short novels in The Promises. The magnificent So little is now carried from one end to the other by its anonymous heroine. A woman who has never moved from where she is. A woman who claims to be one of the “little people “and confessing to having no regrets.

Forty years earlier, when she was 26 and working as a school assistant, “i.e. janitor“. Every morning, it was her job to open the gates of a school in Torre Maura, on a small hill in the southeast of Rome, at 7 a.m., where she was in charge of the stewardship. One rainy day in September, a…