Italian literature – Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two

Sibilla Aleramo’s A Woman (Una Donna) and Alba de Cespedes’ Forbidden Notebook (Quaderno Proibito),

Older Italian edition, first published 1950, translation appeared 1979)

Recent English language edition, photographed with type of book heroine writes in, translator Ann Goldstein, Italian text first published 1952, translated 2023)

Dear Friends and readers,

These are not only two of the finest books by women I’ve read this year; they are both part of an Italian tradition of feminism whose latest extraordinary flowering is found in Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter (La Figlia Oscura, pub 2006, translated 2008, Ann Goldstein) and Neapolitan Quartet (L’Amica Geniale, 2012-2015). A few of Natalia Ginzburg’s novellas are written in this tradition: they are subjective narratives with a woman at the center who is enduring an ordeal-filled life where she is struggling to find and build her most fulfilling identity.

Although written 20 years later than de Cespedes’s novel, Aleramo’s A Woman feels like it should be discussed first, because it is the first book to bring out into the discussably open the intimate realities, feminist aspirations, and real life experiences of a woman and make them the center of the book. Nothing like this in language, nothing with this kind of content, had ever been printed before. It might be summed up with the equivalent title in English feminized: The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. Like Joyce’s book, it is mostly autobiographical (hence the absence of names), and the trajectory is of this of specific-culture drenched obstacles, which in this case are the demands a woman do, and get in the way of her fulfilling her genius for writing. As a woman and in Italy, these obstacles are distinctly different from Joyce’s. Almost no one in the text is named.

As a middle class girl, she is not sent to school beyond the most elementary education; when she is 15, her parents think it is time for her to marry and among her suitors, is one who is more violent and nervy than most of the others; he rapes her, and she thinks (and her parents agree) this means she must marry him. The novel occurs over a 10 year period where she endures being shut up in a bedroom during the day because he is too jealous to let her go anywhere, sex when she doesn’t want it, beatings. She has one son who gives her what joy and meaning she knows. Gradually over a course of time, she and her husband move from Milan to a rural area further south, where her father provides him with a fine-paying job as a factory head (the workers receive derisory wages), and in this town she manages to build a frustrating socializing life. She meets no equal in intelligence or cultural aspiration. She falls in love, is found out, is ostracized horribly, enclosed again. This time she teaches herself to write and reads incessantly, begins to publish (the family has connections) and when her husband loses his job, they move to Rome. She finds friends but is again stymied by this husband who she feels she is bound to all her life, but whom her life enables her to break away from — with help from her family. During the novel she sees her mother end up in an asylum because of treatment parallel to what she’s endured; sisters’ leading thwarted lives, friends too; the men in the novel are often equally twisted. Finally at the end (very like Nora in Ibsen’s play, The Doll’s House, which is alluded to in the novel), she breaks away at great emotional cost, having to leave her beloved son behind. By law she loses a legacy she had inherited, and all that she had owned. But as the last page is reached, she is free, if with a hard road ahead of her.

1913 photograph of Aleramo

My edition (University of California Press, 1983, ISBN 0-520-04949-7, same translator as the older edition) has a superb introduction by Richard Drake where he tells of Aleramo’s life (1876-1960) whose opening phase is told in this autofiction memoir. Aleramo is a pseudonym; her legal name was Rina Pierangeli Faccio. The later phase reminds me of Natalia Ginzburg: Aleramo was politically active, but on behalf of women (suffrage), feminist causes, and the homeless; she was involved with the fascists, the communists and fashionable art movements. She wrote as much journalism as she did fiction. She was for at time the editor of a Milanese feminist journal, L’Italia Femminile. I felt her book really took place in Milan, though Turin as well as Rome were cited. She also differs from Ginzburg because she had a number of lovers, wrote a diary about one affair. Alas, she never wrote another book as daring or relentlessly original as this one. Ginzburg slowly developed into a feminist; Aleramo was there in the first place but her later books and her writing had to backtrack or move into side issues to be published. Her readership and world did not want her to go further than she had. But it was enough and influenced women writers in Italy afterwards. It was one of the books published and pushed during the 1970s phase of feminism in the US and UK, and calls out for attention as an utterly “authentic, controlled and sustained” passionate polemic. I found it mesmerizing, unputdownable.

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I admit that all too often I find book club discussions disappointing; more often they can be frustrating because the level of talk is banal, conventional-conservative, the people unwilling to risk saying what they felt (if they felt something) truly, especially if it relates to private truths about their lives. What made de Cespedes’ so remarkable to me was it prompted several women in on OLLI at Mason book club (in Reston, online via zoom) to spill their “guts” out — their real frustrations, disappointments, troubles as women either married, with children, trying to start a career, at their jobs. A book that can do that must have something in it prompting authentic burning responses. Yet it is a far less daring book than Aleramo’s.

Published in NYC by Astra House, with a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri, it has received a lot of attention from reviewers and summaries of the story can be found readily (see the New York Times Book Review; the Washington Post’s BookWorld; Kirkus). I will tell it little differently:

There are four stories told in this notebook that Valeria Cossati buys and keeps hidden away: that of her husband, who like her during the course of the entries seems to have a liaison with someone else, in his case a publisher-TV person who is considering his script for a screenplay, a deal that ultimately seems to fall through. There is her daughter, who becomes involved with a married man and much to her horror is planning to go off to live with him (of course without marrying him as he is already married). She has a son, who is having a very hard time starting a career, one where it seems he must travel abroad (to both parents’ dismay); he becomes involved with an inferior (in gifts, intellect and perhaps class) girl and gets her pregnant. When the book closes this girl is pregnant and Valeria, our heroine, the center of this multi-plot book about to quit her job and stay home and take care of her grandchild! The opposite of what happens in Una Donna happens her: the book begins with Valeria working and getting a real salary for herself and family, being promoted, daring to explore her psyche, her desires, her real thoughts about all those around her and herself. She is continually wrenched emotionally by her relationships with her children (far more than her husband). She remembers intense tussles with her mother whom she still visits. I think we are to understand that she too has an affair, hers with her boss whom she works for on Sundays (the two of them alone together in the office); the pair of people consider going off together for a holiday but never do this, and by the end of the book Valeria is closing herself off from opportunities for herself to grow, see the world, use this talent for writing she is deeply awakened by.

Mondadori photograph

Perhaps because the heroine is thwarted, because she is deeply conflicted over the new contemporary values and the older traditional ones this book club group responded so frankly — and for themselves, or us (since I was there) usefully. Cespedes herself was no homebody. She also was a journalist, and politically active, more dangerously than Aleramo: Cespedes was jailed for anti-fascist activities during WW2, imprisoned for a time, two of her novels banned; she wrote a screenplay for a best-selling movie. She was married to man in the foreign service (as wikipedia puts it), and stayed with him until his death. In her later years she lived in Paris. Like Una Donna, I found the Forbidden Notebook, if not mesmerizing, unputdownable, and so did several women in my book club. Other of her novels are said to pick up the same themes and treat them in the same conflicted ways.

Like Aleramo, Cespedes has not received the kind of attention and lacks the name recognition of women writers in French, English or German of her calibre and interest. Both of them suffer from the real anti-feminism and suppression of women’s causes and norms as central to the arts until very recently. It should be noted that Ferrante uses a pseudonym (as did Lucia Lopresi as Anna Banti in her marvelous part historical fiction, part autobiography, Artemisa, about the great Renaissance painter who went to court because she was raped).See my blog on Banti and her brilliant book.

The style of both books is plain, lucid, subtle and flexible. I’d say that de Cespedes uses more metaphoric language, more allusion to literary works but that Aleramo’s deep structures are themselves the product of reading much women’s poetry — there was a lot once upon a time in Italy, and letters and journalistic writing going back to the Renaissance.

Fellow readers, you can do no better in fiction or semi-fictional narrative, especially if you are a woman or want to experience a great woman’s book, than read these. I use this qualification for my next book will be on a third extraordinary book you must not miss, the non-fiction narrative by John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Girl’s Tale, a story of rape, class, gender and riot in later 18th century New York City.

Ellen

Natalia Ginzburg: one of the great writers of the 20th century — an Italian woman

Natalia Ginzburg in her older years (1917-1991)

Dear Friends and readers,

I’ve written twice now about Natalia Ginzburg in my blogs, once as one of several women writers I’ve been reading in the last few months; and once as one of four Jewish Italian writers whose lives were shaped by the fascist regime and horizon of fascism they had to live with across nearly 3 decades, one of which was a time of a peculiarly brutal war. It included an attempt to exterminate millions of people on the basis of an ethnicity, Jewishness, on the basis of socialist, anti-fascist and communist beliefs, and on the basis of a perceived non-traditional or non-heterosexual sexuality. All of them knew the terror of fleeing militia come to their houses, to take them away to arrest, imprison, perhaps torture and kill them (which did happen to Natalia’s husband, Leone, one at least came close to death (see On Surviving Fascism: Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, Giorgio Bassanio).

I want to reprise Natalia at full length (for a blog) because since then I’ve read four more of her books, more of her essays, more about her, and I think she belongs here on my blog dedicated to women artists (rather then my more general blog). I feel I know her better. I’ve reread her Family Lexicon or sayings at least three times more. Equally to the point, I’ve read her far more open, revealing, thoughtfully original and riveting books of autobiographical meditations: The Little Virtues and A Place to Live In. Delightful satiric sketches of England alternate with meditations on places of exile. Winter in Abruzzo is a good introduction to Christ Stopped at Eboli. How she went walking and neighbors thought her crazy to do it in winter. At one point in the book she says she did not realize the couple of years she spent there with Leon and two children and had a third were in some ways the happiest of her existence. They began Proust. They were thrown upon one another. Their apartment hunting in Rome. How her world comes alive from within.

Family Sayings is the book by her known best, and includes a wide swathe of 20th century history in Italy as a backdrop to this family chronicle. It has all the characteristics of l’ecriture-femme: cyclical, a deeply private or personal (if inarticulated) viewpoint, a mother-daughter paradigm at its center; a portrait of herself as a mother, marriage to a beloved man as pivotal. de-centered: she hardly ever gives us her or her family’s thoughts hidden from the collective outward life; the anecdotes are mostly about others, with her as the quietly presiding POV. Yet the book is about her life, starting with the time she has consecutive memories at age 5 to near the end of her life when she visited England with her second husband, and now somehow freed of her immediate Italian world can spill out what happened the intimate events and calamities inflicted on her family and close friends and associates as well as their relationships, achievements, losses

Part of the reason for her reticence is this is a memoir, all the people are real, and the events really happened, so she must protect them and herself. I suggest frustration at this led Peg Boyers to write the feelings and thoughts we do surmise (we are given enough to extrapolate) in a series of fictionalized autobiographical poems (written as if written by Natalia), Hard Bread, that give Natalia’s repressed reactions and only partly expressed critiques (even in the autobiographical essays) and celebrations full play. The most extended section is about Cesare Pavese who worked closely with her husband, who she worked with at Einaudi, and who appears to have frequently had suicidal thoughts – who wouldn’t during WW2 – and hated surprises. I take it he didn’t care for liminality – crossing from one mode of existence into another, enduring uncertainty. He visited the US, translated famous American classics into Italian (like Moby Dick famous book is very Thomas Hardy like: The Moon and the Bonfires.

Family sayings are repeated phrases, words, sentences that the family uses as collective comic glue for themselves. And we can track them (as they add and subtract people) from one place to another as they move around Italy, or are forced to move, hide, become imprisoned, escape (her brother swam across a part of the Mediterranean in winter to reach unoccupied France). I loved her plain matter-of-fact style: simple sentences expect us to provide in-depth understanding as when she says of Jewish and other displaced now vulnerable peoples they are “without a country.” While the surface is prosaic, quietly telling about all sorts of interesting people (many involved in politics and literature), the underlying pattern is tragic. Boyers calls her style and tone “astringent yet passionate.” The refrain: I never saw him again (of her husband); they never saw one another again. Like Virginia Woolf in Jacob’s Room, she produces a portrait of humanity as seen through the lens of an Italian secular and political and only partly Jewish culture (her family had been thoroughly assimilated until suddenly ostracized, under attack, mortally threatened) — during a time of aggressive fascism.

This poem is imagined as by Natalia when she brings out of prison the small box of things found in her husband’s cell after his terrible death:

Prison Box: Inventory (Rome, February 1944)

copy War and Peace
cyrillic type
(fading, spine bent)

cashmere scarf,
arm length
(dirty, white, torn)

photographs of a girl,
two boys
and a woman (frayed at the edges)

pencil stubs
(carbon
tips spent)

lined spiral notebook
(nine pages left,
yellowed, blank)

pair of wire-rimmed glasses
(left lens shattered,
nose support gone)

— from Peg Boyers’ Hard Bread, a poetic autobiography for Natalia, this poem the imagined box of things she could have gotten after her husband, Leone, had been tortured to death

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In the New Statesman, the book was called a portrait of her family

A more concrete way of describing Family Lexicon:

The book follows the contours of Natalia’s life. She omits dates and it’s fair to say some crucial events in her personal life seem to be brushed over – like how did she and Leone fall in love, what was their wedding like, the couple of years together in exile; how did she come to marry a second man, live with him in England – yet I put to you she is central – her tone, she is the narrator shaping our feelings and thoughts about the characters she presents and although not a novel there is a high point and crises and denouement for her and her brothers and mother and father.

A real structure emerges aligned with her family’s life. It is the story of her family. A few dates: she’s the fifth child of a Jewish a renowned Professor and Catholic mother living in Turin. She was born 1916, died 1991. So across the 20th century. Her parents secular, her brothers atheists, very active as anti-fascists – of the artisan intellectual class – think of Thomas Paine not that far off. Married Leone Ginzburg 1938 and there were 3 children. One of them Carlo became a much respected historian. Leon died in prison after enduring horrific torture (it’s said including a mock crucifixion). He had been a communist but so were many so I don’t know why he was so singled out. It reminds me of the German philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer who also died terribly after participating in a semi-famous attempt to kill Hitler. When they returned from exile they went to Rome and proceeded to publish an anti-fascist newspaper – had it been me I’d have fled. She remarries in 1950, Gabriele Baldini a scholar of English literature, spent time with him in England (very funny sketches), he died in 1969.

Her writing career began early in the sense she began to write early but first publication was 1933 I Bambini. She spent a long time as an editor at the respected publisher Einaudi; she was probably one of the people who rejected Lampedusa’s Leopard and who made the publication of holocaust memoirs slow. Curious they were very keen on Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, the American assumed it was simply an anti-communist book. She wrote. 11 what’s called novels, 5 books of essays, much of it partly life writing, much profound despite easy style and wry manner, a number of plays.

Further Contexts:

One is the connection to the holocaust memoirs: her book shows a drive to remember, to record what was and to tell of what the experience of fascism was within the family. A desire to bear witness. She is very concerned not to exaggerate or say something that is not. That’s partly why it seems so jagged. She has not smoothed things out. She tells what she remembers almost as she is remembering it and some of it is way out of chronology.

Two the questions I sent I list pages where you can find the adventures and final fates of her three brothers and Adriano Olivetti who married her sister Paola. No. 4. Another question I simply listed all the places in the text that Leone Ginzburg occurs in – if you want to see how she feels about him you have to go from point to point.

I think after her father and her mother the most coherent portrait of a character in the book is Cesare Pavese, a novelist and essayist and translator (of American texts) of the era – as she was. Like Carlo Levi, Pavese worked with Ginzburg’s husband as an anti-fascist political activist (though he did join the fascist party to get a job as a teacher), he also worked with Natalia at Einaudi, the publisher. She was very close to him and for three pages tries to explain how he came to kill himself.

The second context is nostalgia, a deep desire to retreat, a turning away from what is imminently in front of you. Last week someone mentioned Bassani’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis; Family Lexicon is sometimes written about as a very similar kind of book. Her theme is the insufficiency of language to express what is happening about them. So too Bassani – rich Jewish and a fascist for a while – as was Pirandello.

It’s a post-modern book. A post-modern book is one which rejects traditional ideas about hierarchy, what is virtue, and wants to find much more accurate descriptions of what motivates people. They disavow belief in progress. A kind of collapse. I mentioned the first day that Carlo Levi’s book is a poetic masterpiece. If you’ve started you will have seen why I saw that. It is also a political masterpiece. He does something you won’t find in any of our other texts: he goes behind the definitions of fascism or ways of categorizing it to depict specific characters/people he meets who are fuelled by an embittered rage or hatred and explains why and how they got there and how that links to what might seem ridiculous opinions: like at the time being for invading Abysinnia and Ethiopa.

Time after time in the book you feel you have seen the inward working of what is expressed as political ideology. She doesn’t believe in political ideology She’s often quoted (people who are anti-feminist or not feminist love this) as denying she is a feminist though her later books especially focus on women’s worlds and how they are abused, not given equal rights in most areas of life. She isn’t. A political ideology is a mask, a tool. All our writers are strongly sceptical observers. In 1960 when Dr Zhivago won the Nobel prize it has been translated only into Italian where it was an enormous hit. Its sense of a govt that is deeply decadent and and a people out of whack with what were thought historical forces by learned people is the same

There are people who can’t or won’t flee; driven to it, after hiding, a long time elsewhere, return to stay. She was one of these.

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A few critics:

Rachel Cusk wrote a short essay or column on her which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (April 2018, p 25): Violent Vocation: Natalia Ginzburg, and a “New Template for the Female Voice.” It served as an introduction to Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues. usk suggests that after all Ginzburg was a feminist writer – she denied she was in the category. Not unusual I’m sorry to say. What I told you of was that when she started out she was concerned lest she be dismissed as a woman writer and tried to write like a man. That seems to have meant to her to be impersonal, to hide herself; that Family Lexicon is the turning point and after she writes so very appealingly of herself candidly within limits. Epistolary novels flow from her, more memoirs in the form of life-writing essays on themes. Cusk tells us she was instrumental in forming a woman’s voice for the era; for producing books for the first time which were feminocentric: woman at the center and their lives. Still not easy to do and we still find women using pseudonyms to protect their private lives. The template includes highly violent feelings after silent or not-so-silent violence is inflicted on you; irony, nastiness, indifference to money, courage, contempt for danger, not a desire for success but to be who you are and do what enables you to know your worlds. Yes all that. Not open about sex itself.

Her followers include then Elsa Morante, Anna Banti, Anna Maria Ortese, Sibylla Aleramo, Alba de Cespedes, Elena Ferrante.

Mary Gordon’s life and works of Ginzburg in the New York Times Magazine. She’s a well-known American novelist, often writes stories where her characters are influenced by Catholicism. She tells us she first came across Natalia Ginzburg when she was traveling in 1971 as a young college student and in Florence came across a copy of The Little Virtues, was entranced, the only women writer of a book in the whole Italian book store. This essay is about her coming to visit and interview Ginzburg many years later, and they go out to supper together. Mary Gordon basic idea is Ginzburg is an iconoclast; she takes up positions that are not expected or popular. At the time Ginzburg had written a piece siding with adoptive parents in a controversial trial. Very unusual. Gordon retells the family’s endurance and ordeals and flights in WW2, the terrible fate of Leon Ginzburg; how few women were published writers when Ginzburg began her writing career; she smoked heavily – the ambiance of her apartment, Ginzburg’s love of Chekhov. Why did she write a family chronicle? She had just written one of Manzoni’s family instead of a biography of the famous author of the Bethrothed.

Small virtues are the ones that matter. You should not be trying to pass on the great bourgeois norms of prudence, money-making, ambition, thrift, self first, caution, but rather idealism, generosity, greatness of vision, self-sacrifice and whatever is best in the child’s character. I agree with her – no need to repeat what they’ll hear on TV commercials and maybe in mainstream schools. Her writing was not a career to make money and gain fame, but her vocation.

Joan Acocella in the New Yorker finds parallels between attitudes of mind in Ginzburg and Virginia Woolf – Ginzburg a slightly younger generation but also with an academic father, well educated and upper class but at home mother. She quotes from Ginzburg’s My Vocation:

A particular sympathy grows up between us and the characters we invent—that our debilitated imagination is still just able to invent—a sympathy that is tender and almost maternal, warm and damp with tears, intimately physical and stifling. We are deeply, painfully rooted in every being and thing in the world, the world which has become filled with echoes and trembling and shadows, to which we are bound by a devout and passionate pity. Then we risk foundering on a dark lake of stagnant, dead water, and dragging our mind’s creations down with us, so that they are left to perish among dead rats and rotting flowers in a dark, warm whirlpool.

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Eric Gudas offers more traditional literary criticism. He found it funny at moments but it is a meditation on memory and story telling. Our author is dredging up memories as they come to her and writing them down.

Turati and Kuliscioff [not married to one another and so an embarrasment to the mother] were ever-present in my mother’s reminiscences. I knew they were both still alive and living in Milan (perhaps together, perhaps in two different apartments) and that they were still involved in politics and the fight against fascism. Nevertheless, in my imagination, they had become tangled up with other figures who were also ever-present in my mother’s reminiscences: her parents, Silvio, the Lunatic, Barbison. People who were either dead or, if still alive, very old and belonging to a distant time, to far-off events when my mother was a child … even if I were to meet them and touch them they were not the same as the ones I imagined and even if they were still alive they were in any case tainted by their proximity to the dead with whom they dwelled in my soul; and they had taken up the step of the dead, light and elusive

My own last thought for noiw: that Family Lexicon represents a turning point in her life – that before this time in England, she was anxious, frightened, nervous about publishing as a woman, as a distinctively woman’s voice. And that she identified women’s voices with subjectivity and private life; but that writing this book freed her.

We might look about all these family sayings – however painful and ambiguous all these jokes are – as a form of cleansing. For her father I think his rants – are a way of exorcizing anger, anxiety, a sense of helplessness. I shall return and read much more by and about her.

Ellen

Politics & Prose classes on women’s fiction & authors; genre fiction for, by, about women; Lot’s wife re-seen

Hilary Mantel’s superb non-fiction essays, a selection from the London Review of Books

A rare almost Radcliffean female gothic fiction for Oates

Dear friends and readers,

For about 12 weeks now I’ve been taking on-line courses at Politics and Prose and the quality and level of the discussions, the information and insights offered have been as excellent as those I’ve been taking now online from Cambridge, early evening British time, early afternoon East Coast on Saturdays and/or Sundays. These have occurred across the pandemic and I chose mostly women and mostly Bloomsbury era women (exceptions include a session on E.M. Forster, and a session each on Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Christina Rossetti’s poetry).

At Politics and Prose I can’t recommend highly enough Helen Hooper, Elaine Showalter, and at Cambridge University in their programs just about every Literature professor I’ve been privileged to listen to and watch (as these are video zooms). I’ve read books I’ve never read before by Mantel, Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates — including Black Water, the astonishing tour-de-force retelling of the drowning and suffocation of Mary Jo Kopecknek at the close of her mad drive with Ted Kennedy down unpaved roads over an unsteady bridge. I’ve now a rounded point of view on Mantel, a way of putting her works together coherently for the first time. Maybe my favorite session from Cambridge in the last few months was on Vita Sackville-West by Alison Hennegan. I discovered Sackville-West’s love of animals.

The question I asked myself about Mantel was how much of her fiction was an escape for and protest against her from her fraught family life, traumatic health problems, and religious ways of thought (especially her interest in seance mediums). Paradoxically it’s not her imaginative fiction-writing self that is most aggressive in building a new identity, but her non-fictional arguments and the first two of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. For Shirley Jackson she takes on the type of the older woman alone, unable to navigate herself in a deeply hostile world (“The Bus”); she cannot escape cruelty it seems. To me Joyce Carol Oates in much of her fiction is herself living vicariously thrills and adventures at whatever price these cost her heroines (death, fearsome rape), with no concern for safety – so often so central to women’s stories. There is something troublingly irresponsible in Oates. It seems to me that American female gothic as practiced by these two women almost avoided the supernatural in order to make concrete to women readers what the life of an American woman is today. By contrast, Mantel is drawn to it in her contemporary British gothic comedic novels.

At the same time I’ve been going further in my popular genre books by, for, about female characters and discovered I can enjoy P.D. James’s Cordelia Grey books (detective fiction), Italian women women’s fiction: I just began Alba de Crespedes’ Forbidden Notebook, as translated by Ann Goldstein:

This last, perhaps not as well known in English-readers’ circles as I hope it might become is about a woman who after WW2 decides to keep a prohibited notebook. The closer word in Italian is prohibited. (Another instance of Goldstein’s inadequacy). The whole set of attitudes Valeria has to get beyond to even purchase and then hide her notebook brings home the inner world of Lila when she keeps a series of notebook and the profound betrayal Elena enacts when she throws them in the river in Florence. Purchase laws are against her, she has no space for it, little time because she hasn’t a maid and she has a job (this money is why she can buy it); she’s afraid to tell her husband who might suggest she give it to her son. I can see that the tragedy might be that she discovers herself … Very modern tale. Jhumpa Lahiri provides an insightful contextual introduction, and Elena Ferrante is quoted urging us to read it

For a couple of weeks I immersed myself in the fiction of Natalia Ginzburg, and the poetry and life of Elsa Morante in the course I’m teaching on Italian memoirs and novels and poetry of the 20th century — more than a couple of weeks because this was a culmination of several months on and off.

With my friend and mate over on Trollope&Peers, Tyler Tichelaar, a historical novelist, I read the whole of Devoney Looser’s very long study of Jane and Anna Maria Porter, two early historical fiction (and other genre) writers around the time of, or just before Jane Austen and the Brontes: Sister Novelists: Trailblazing Sisters. The Porter sisters left a huge treasure trove of candid letters from which Looser constructed their hard and fascinating lives as independent women writers. Their courage, stamina, ability to network and live on very little, their romances and enormous amount of fiction produced puts before us a new angle on the world Austen lived in, a lot freer sexually than is usually supposed: the question was did they invent historical fiction or did what they call historical fiction lack a deep consciousness of the past (and real research into it) as shaping force of what was and is, such as we find in Scott.

As I found myself thinking about the archetypal heroine’s journey, so I’ve been looking to see if when women take over popular genres, there is some subset or continuous underlying themes, tropes, norms that cross these genres (each having to conform to readers’ expectations). An image one sees on many of the covers of their detective fiction is the typewriter:

I’ve not come to any conclusion that will allow me to concretize the l’ecriture-femme elements in these books but the topic is on my mind and I’m not alone as I pursue it.

I’m neglecting no one; I’m now watching serial dramas based on Agatha Christie’s famous series of Miss Marple: two nights in a row found me really engaged by one of the original episodes with Joan Hickman (The Body in the Library) and tonight I began a brand-new one: Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, which includes Emma Thompson and Jim Broadbent in a hilarious scene as our amateur female sleuth’s parents.

At night I’ve re-begun Christie’s Autobiography, read by me 40 years ago and still remembered.

So this is some of what has been occupying me over these past weeks — some eighteenth century matter in Looser’s book while I listened to David Rintoul’s exhilarating reading aloud of Scott’s Waverley (very entertaining tones and Scots accent). I will end on a poem by Anna Akhmatova as translated by Annie Finch. The poem was brought to mind by Graham Christian’s writing of postings about poets daily for this month of April on face-book

Lot’s Wife

“But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” –—Genesis 19:25-26

The righteous man followed where God’s angel guide
shone on through black mountains, imposing and bright —
but pain tore his wife’s breast. It turned her aside
and said, “Look again! There is time for one sight
Of towers, and Sodom’s red halls, and the place
Where you sang in the courtyard or wove on your loom
By windows now empty — where you knew the embrace
Of love with your husband—where birth filled the room —.”

She looked. And the sight was more bitter than pain.
It shut up her eyes so she saw nothing more;
She shimmered to salt; her feet moved in vain,
Deep rooted at last in the place she died for.

Who weeps for her now? Who can care for the fate
Of someone like that—a mere unhappy wife?
My heart will remember. I carry the weight
Of one who looked back, though it cost her her life.

I like this one because the POV is not the implicitly masculine POV or Lot’s male POV. We begin with an impersonal verse; at “it turned her aside” we move into the woman’s perspective (whose name we are still not told. Then we move into the second person, “You” and the last three lines are the torture she’s feeling — just for wanting a sliver of freedom within enslavement unto death.

Just arrived! and this was a hard one to find for a reasonable price ($9.99 at WorldofBooks): The other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow (Mary at last)

And Isobel completed this beautiful puzzle: that’s Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Nora Zeale Hurston and Virginia Woolf

Ellen

OLLI at Mason: Contemporary Italian Memoirs & Novels: 2023 spring online

A spring syllabus for reading a group of 20th & 21st century Italian novels and memoirs

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: Thursday afternoons, 2:15 to 3:40 pm, March 30 to May 18, 2023
F405Z Contemporary Italian Memoirs and Novels
8 sessions online (location site) : 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va 22032
Dr Ellen Moody

To begin the process of registration go to: https://olli.gmu.edu/

Description of Course:

In this course, participants will read a group of Italian works with a view to understanding the culture, history and politics of Italy over the last hundred years or so. We’ll read Natalia Ginzburg’s memoir, The Family Lexicon (1963) which takes place in Turin and Rome before, during, and after WWII; Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, a memoir of his time in exile in WWII (1947); Primo Levi’s Periodic Table (1984), a witty semi-chemical memoir; Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan Quartet books (2012); and poetry, essays & non-fiction life-writing, and online films (The Bicycle Thieves, Bitter Rice, & film adaptations of our books) as relevant. The course will have as subthemes Italian-Jewish writers, the holocaust and WW2, women’s and life-writing, post WW2 Italy in films.

Required Books:

Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, translated by Jenny McPhee, afterword by Peg Boyers. New York Review of Books Classics paperback. ISBN 978-59017-838-6
Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, translated by Frances Fenaye, introduction Mark Rotella. NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-53009-2
Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. NY: Schocken Books. ISBN0-8052-1041-5
Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein. NY: Europa, 2012. ISBN 978-1-60945-078-6

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion. The schedule is not cast in cement; if we find we need more or less sessions for any particular text or topic, we can be flexible.

Mar 30: 1st week: Introduction: Italian Literature and history. Ginzburg & women’s writing. Begin The Family Lexicon

Apr 6: 2nd week: The Family Lexicon & excerpts (non-fiction life-writing) from The Little Virtues and A Place to Live.
Apr 13: 3rd week: Carlo Levi & WW2 & fascism. Christ Stopped at Eboli

Apr 20: 4th week: Christ Stopped at Eboli. 1943: German take-over, Willing Executioners, the Risorgimento, roots of fascism.
Apr 27: 5th week: Holocaust Memoirs. An excerpt from Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After. Iris Origo’s Diary. Primo Levi, Post-WW 2 Italy. Begin The Periodic Table
May 4: 6th week: The Periodic Table.
May 11: 7th week: Post WW2 Italy: Neo-realistic film: Vittoria De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (steams online at Amazon Prime, Criterion Collection &c) . Elena Ferrante & My Brilliant Friend
May 18: 8th week: My Brilliant Friend and Bitter Rice (streams online at Amazon Prime) People could watch the first season on the 2019 TV film serial, My Brilliant Friend (also on Amazon Prime, Criterion Collection &c). Last Thoughts.