"The text enthralls ... " - Anna-Leena Härkönen, Finnish author

"For every suicide, it is estimated that there are six deeply affected survivors, and the World Health Organization reported one million (indisputable) suicides in 2000. Conservatively: each night, over eighty-two thousand people will try to kill themselves. Some call on pills and nooses as their advocates; others use knives guns cliffs gas. Out of these eighty-two thousand lives, some three thousand are snuffed. Conservatively: each morning, over sixteen thousand hearts will break.

"What will happen to them? What happens to all those shattered after a loved one has committed suicide. Antonella Gambotto has given voice to these people.

"Gambotto first encountered death as her grandmother died of cancer: 'Some deaths bring families together; this death blew the family apart. There were bits of us everywhere. I was probably the worst.'

"Here begins a series of events that forces Gambotto to look at death from different aspects. A little girl who has lost the most beloved adult of her life and thereby also her sense of basic security, becomes a woman. As a woman, she loses her fiance Michael (suicide with drugs) and quite soon after that, her baby brother Gianluca. Gianluca gasses himself, suffocates in his car with a plastic bag covering his head.

"The author throws herself almost passionately into the study of death and suicide. She wants to know. She wants to understand. She wants to survive. First and foremost, The Eclipse is a survival story of a bereaved sister. Gambotto first drags the reader into the depths with her, and then helps the reader to re-emerge.

"Although the narrative runs as fragmented stream of consciousness, it is coherent: every bit falls into place. The translator succeeds in preserving the author's full-bodied language; the text enthralls, it leaves the reader as naked and vulnerable as the author has been. Neither quality can be found in a cool analytic approach.

"The Eclipse is both a novel and a report on suicide. Can a novel whose subject matter is suicide be entertaining? Yes, it can. The Eclipse describes horrible events both piercingly and lightly. It opens up for the reader in a completely different manner than, say, Black Sun, Julia Kristeva's work on depression.

"While Kristeva's book is packed with jargon requiring a degree in psychology to understand, The Eclipse only demands the courage to read.

"This book is significant particularly because attitudes towards suicide still are judgemental and aggressive. Suicides are stigmatised as selfish and irresponsible, their decision considered stupid and short-sighted. 'Suicide is misunderstood as a petulant gesture,' Gambotto accurately writes. 'Oh, you just want attention!'

"This attitude is incredibly cruel and immature. A deeply depressed person has no strength to think about anything but the ending of his/her suffering. Anyone who has experienced depression knows that the suffering of those left behind is irrelevant.

"Suicide is often considered reprehensible as it is a conscious act. Unless the person who committed suicide was schizophrenic, drunk or stoned at the time of death, he executed himself consciously. Unless chemicals are detected in the victim's blood, the death is much crueler to family and friends.

"Does this make the suicide somehow worse? Furthermore: how conscious can self-murder be in the first place? Does any suicidal person have the strength to understand the finality of the act or do they just see it as an escape?

"Gambotto is no advocate of suicide. However, she does not assume an arrogant position. Here, in my opinion, lies the core of her argument. The decisions of others should be respected, however merciless they may be. We have to let them go. Letting go is an act of love.

"Love also fosters understanding. Gambotto dives deep into the mental landscape of a suicide and extensively examines the underlying causes of suicide: the fantasies that suicides have of a future, better life.

"'Those who commit suicide want in death that which they do not have in life,' Gambotto writes. I regard this as one of the greatest insights of this book.

"What is it that people who commit suicide wish to obtain? Return to a prenatal state? Complete safety and repose? Perfect peace, perfect love, integration into something forgiving and grand?

"Maybe they wish that death will dispel for good immeasurable loneliness. Disappointment for the realisation that one cannot, in the end, help another beyond their willingness to be helped is so crushing that the only option left is to retreat.

"Like every suicide survivor, Gambotto also asks where our loved ones go. Do they continue their existence in some other form? Is there a Hell? Or is Hell here on earth?

"Gambotto's ideology is not exactly religious, but highly spiritual and antimaterialistic. She does not believe consciousness to be dependent on the physical processes of the human body. Therefore, she does not see suicide as the end of suffering.

"'Death is not the opposite of life; the opposite of death is birth,' Gambotto continues. 'Life has no opposite. It is a constant, like the universe. Suicide solves nothing.'

"It is, indeed, true that there is no evidence suffering ends as our life ends. On the other hand, there is no evidence that it won't. We don't know. None of us knows.

"Gambotto, her writing raw and exposed, does not spare herself. She openly writes about her own suicide attempts and emotional problems.

"Does this mean that Gambotto is a more sensitive person than the rest of us? Were Michael or Gianluca exceptionally sensitive men? Or is the world, actually, an impossible place to live in for everybody? Are people who commit suicide 'right', after all?

"Regardless of all her suffering, Gambotto sees life as everything but a set of coincidences, and finds sense in the hardest of experiences. Grief increases the capacity for empathy. Suffering is a gift ('with each new grief, your heart grows softer ... and softer ... until it's soft as butter,' she writes. 'Grief does not make us stronger, but kinder.')

"Personally, I compare the experience of grief to the experience of motherhood: both render you more vulnerable and thereby more capable of compassion and empathy. Believing that everything has a meaning may be luxury reserved for those well off, but it may also be the only manner to maintain the sense in continuing to live.

"I have undergone the same experience as Gambotto and tried to process it through writing. I was shocked to realise how similar the experiences of survivors are: rage, shock, guilt, missing. Each sorrow, of course, is different, but the amount of similarities is astonishing. A survivor is abandoned, betrayed, amputated. A survivor does not only miss the parted loved one but also herself as the person she used to be, the person who had not experienced bereavement.

"Guilt comes with the territory: What more could I have done? Why didn't I see? How could I be so blind and selfish? But one must not get stuck with guilt. One must go on. One must try to believe in life, however naive one might feel.

"The surviving methods of the bereaved vary a great deal. Some immerse themselves in work, others need a complete pause and some time to heal in peace. Some resort to medication, others drink until they cannot drink anymore. Some write and talk themselves hollow, others grieve in silence. Gambotto treats herself by 'immersion in beauty'. She walks miles and miles a day by the sea, and violently dances in an empty house.

"Gradually, colours start to return to her life.

"Some people choose laughter to be a basic component of their life. I, too, tried desperately to find amusing and positive sides of my experience. I decided that I wouldn't let this steal the laughter from my life. Today, my grief is much less physical; it has transformed into an inner beat. Beautiful things are not as unbearable anymore.

"A suicide survivor understands, at the very least, that every day can be the last and that every day counts. Every living person is important, more important than the one who decided to leave.

"One must let go at times. One must be gentle to oneself. One is allowed to be gentle to oneself.

"According to Gambotto, 'getting over it' is a choice: 'once the initial shock of death subsides and with instances of the head and heart uncoiling, the bereaved make a decision to work through their grief or remain forevermore defined by it.'

"I couldn't agree more. You cannot dwell in the past. The dead should not be worshipped. If a shrine is to be erected, it should be to your own life.

"All in all, The Eclipse is a very comforting book. With her exuberant love for life, Gambotto is the most secure guide to a reality defined by grief and pain. In the life of the bereaved, joy and awe are filtered through pain. Once you stop fighting the pain, you stop fighting yourself.

"I personally felt that I got my sister back at the moment I accepted that she will never come back.

"Suicide is still a taboo. Survivors often desperately try to conceal the reasons that led to the suicide. This is a dead-end street. This is a point at which all false fronts should be kicked down to end the charade.

"'Secret elisions within families are suddenly revealed by self-execution, and just as quickly sheeted with excuses, blame, and counter-blame,' Gambotto writes.

"This is very understandable. The feeling of guilt forces all too many to keep quiet, thus slowing down their own healing. Gambotto ends the silence for her part. And it heals both her and the reader."

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