The Unlearned Lesson of Untold Lessons

Untold Lessons (Tornare dal bosco literally Returning from the Woods. The US title is Dear Teacher)

by Maddalena Vaglio Tanet:

Hardback: September 12, 2024

Paperback: July 3, 2025

Pushkin Press

In the beginning it was the title. What exactly is an untold lesson? 

Synopsis: The novel opens with a striking premise: a teacher named Silvia disappears into the woods after the shocking news of a favourite student's death. As the mystery of her disappearance takes hold in her small Italian village, the narrative delves into Silvia's past, the speculative theories of the villagers, and the impact of her absence on the community. The story delves into the psyche of a teacher and how a tragic event related to a student impacts her, potentially offering insights into the emotional and psychological toll of the profession and the relationships formed within it.

Whose Untold Lesson?

The book sat for over a week in my bedside pile. The ambiguity of the title didn't just puzzle me, it got under my skin. It was like one of those itches that you just can't stop scratching at. Whose "untold lessons"? Were they intended for the characters to give or receive, or intended solely for the reader? And if the lesson goes untold, can it even be considered a lesson at all? who didn't tell it; who didn't learn it? All these questions, and I hadn't even reached the first page. When I finally started, I prepared myself for the big reveal. I read, and waited. And it didn't happen. Which of course makes absolute sense because it's untold. It was only afterwards that I learned how this lesson actually unfolds. It emerges gradually with nuance and subtlety through the reading experience and long after the final page. Untold Lessons is a profoundly haunting meditation on loss.

Echoes of the Unlearned 

The novel is inspired by the tragically real events that happened more than fifty years ago, originating from the author's own family history and community lore. Vaglio Tanet pieced the story together from scattered allusions, fragments, and then corroborated details by finding old newspaper articles, and although she hasn't publicly named the specific individuals or provided all the granular details of the true event (likely to maintain the privacy of those involved and allow for fictional interpretation), the core elements are derived from this historical incident. 

Vaglio Tanet has emphasized that she wasn't writing a journalistic account, but rather using these real fragments as a foundation to explore the novel's deeper themes of guilt and responsibility, compassion and self-acceptance, and community and the human psyche in the face of tragedy. It is perhaps for this reason that the novel deliberately avoids imagining the crucial moment of the student's death, focusing instead on the aftermath and its ripple effects. 

This basis is not merely historical fact. It has the effect of making the novel's story seem less like a telling than a retelling. It is as if the real event were the first occurrence, the fall, and the literary event, a repetition of that cataclysm. The fact that the author felt compelled to revisit and re-imagine an event from her own past, that perhaps the community (and humanity) has still not fully processed or learned from, lends significant weight to the idea that we are not so much dealing with an untold lesson so much as an unlearned lesson. 

We are often told in the face of tragedy that lessons have, or will be learned. It's often the first platitude out of a politician’s mouth. But if the logic of this interpretation holds true, it's only a matter of time for the lesson to happen again. The persistent lesson in the novel is that the untold all too easily becomes the unlearned. Is it really our collective fate to learn nothing?

Growing up with Franz Kafka

Which book has the best opening lines?

When I started as an apprentice electrician, I hadn't read anything literary. The only book that I remember us reading at school was Clive King's Stig of the Dump. A year later, when we were fifteen and knew everything, we almost read John Christopher's brilliant sci-fi novel of environmental catastrophe The Death of Grass. But we stopped after a couple of chapters because the class hated it. We did West Side Story instead. I guess that might have been because it was the east-end of Glasgow, and our English English teacher thought we'd be able relate to violent gang fights. The experience made three lasting impressions: 

• firstly that I hated English teachers;
• secondly, that the idea of relevance was a repugnant one - and thirdly,
• a lifelong and totally unjustified hatred of poor old Lenny Bernstein's music.

When I started as an apprentice, the EETPU shop-steward told me that I should be reading Camus and Kafka. He wasn't the sort of person who suggested things, so at the end of my 39-hour week and with my newfound wealth of £38.17 minus travel expenses, minus the pocket money that I was told that I had to give my younger brother, minus my mum's dig money, minus money to buy tools, I managed to put a little aside to buy Albert Camus' The Outsider at the end of the first month and Franz Kafka's The Trial at the end of the next. I bought both books from that great Glaswegian institution of John Smith and Sons on St. Vincent Street. It's long gone now, of course, but it became part of my life after that first visit. And even though it's gone, it still is.

The question at the top of this post was asked by Laura Hackett in The Times newspaper's Culture newsletter. Paraphrasing Tolstoy, Ms. Hackett observes that books with great opening lines are all uniquely different. For my part the choice was straightforward.  It was either 

Camus' Outsider:

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. The telegram didn't say.

or,

Kafka's Trial:

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.

Twenty years later, when I left Glasgow City Council's employ, that same shop steward wrote The Outsider's opening lines in my going away card. The ones I've automatically signed tend to contain nothing better than façile "good luck" wishes. No-one, in my experience, really wants to tell the truth. But after all that time, he'd remembered. And it seemed like perhaps in buying those books at his "suggestion" that that had mattered something to him. I hadn't known that. The Camus book has been lost along the way, but I still have the Kafka. It's been with me my whole adult life. Strange things books.

In the end, it had to be the Kafka. Nothing was quite the same after both books. But it had to be the Kafka.

I replied to Ms. Hackett, and was chuffed to see it selected the following week: