That Elena Ferrante has been Italy’s most prominent literary export for years now is perhaps to the detriment of that country’s other great contemporary writers.
One is Donatella Di Pietrantonio, a pediatric dentist who shares a publisher and translator with Ferrante (Europa, Ann Goldstein, respectively). Like Ferrante, Di Pietrantonio writes female coming-of-age stories, though the measured style of her Strega Prize-winning fifth novel, The Brittle Age, has none of the narrative relentlessness that characterizes Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy. Slim and emotionally perceptive, it’s based on the real-life murders, in the 1990s, of two young women, and the attempted murder of a third, in Italy’s Abruzzo region.
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You wouldn’t call it true crime though, since the crime simply acts as a catalyst for the individual and societal reverberations that will echo through the days and decades to come.
Our narrator is Lucia, a physiotherapist whose best friend, Doralice, survived the attack – physically, at least. Lucia’s farmer father also happened to own the forested mountain site where the girls were killed. Thirty years later, the land still has a strong taint of tragedy to it, so it’s with reluctance that Lucia, an only child, accepts its transfer from her father. Her daughter’s recent return home from university, following a seemingly random attack on the street, has also stirred things up.
Through reminiscences, we learn that Lucia and Doralice’s relationship unravelled after the tragedy, in part because of an undisclosed lie Lucia told in order to protect her social ambitions, but which plausibly sent Doralice directly into the murderer’s path.
As much as it might deal in keyword topics (gender, class, generational trauma), The Brittle Age is very much a book about humans, not issues. It’s an impactful, quick read.
In their home country, Di Pietrantonio’s compatriot Domenico Starnone is also considered a “writer’s writer.” And if he comes closer to Ferrante-level recognition here, it’s likely owing to the fact that, during the height of the efforts to de-anonymize the author, some were convinced he was Ferrante (suspicion also fell on Starnone’s wife, Rita Raja). Writing Ferrante’s novels would be an impressive feat, given how prolific Starnone has been under his own name.
About an 82-year-old novelist (Starnone’s current age) named Nicola, or Nico, who arrives in a seaside town near Rome and begins inserting himself into the lives of its residents through acts of random generosity, The Old Man by the Sea is hard not to read as a semi-autobiographical swan song.
Nico’s unusual behaviour, his constant glimpses of a sprite-like figure “outlined in gold,” and the novel’s winking Hemingway references combine to suggest that he has come to the town to prepare for his death. He buys an overpriced inflatable kayak from an obvious charlatan – the kind of virile male Nico has come to hate – even though he’s never kayaked; finds a large clip of cash in the sand that he hands to a curmudgeonly detectorist; goes to a women’s clothing boutique, where he asks the attendant, Lu, to try on multiple outfits as a way of conjuring his long-dead mother.
Creepy Freudian overtones (or tones) are quickly quashed as we learn how, as a child, Nico’s worship of his beautiful seamstress mother had been ruined by the jealous, rage-filled father who “took her apart with his voice.” The clothes, Nico explains, are an attempt “to pull her to safety even if she is only a shadow of a shadow of a shadow.”
Though he still maintains his writerly habit of notetaking, Nico feels his gifts, along with his body, abandoning him. In fact, he’s not sure he was ever a good a writer at all; was, rather, a pretentious, turgid one that never rose to the level of his heroes.
Time and again, The Old Man by the Sea rejects the maudlin and mawkish for something funny, fable-like and profoundly anti-heroic, the latter best encapsulated by Starnone’s substitution of Hemingway’s masculinity-testing marlin for the “giant squid” that, on closer look, is actually a joyous Nico being paddled around by Lu in his overpriced inflatable kayak.
A similar gentle surrealism pervades We Are Green and Trembling, though its setting could hardly be more different.
By the Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezon Camara, who had a previous novel shortlisted for the International Booker and Medicis prizes, it is based on the extraordinary real-life story of Catalina de Erauso – a.k.a. “The Lieutenant Nun.” Its elevator pitch might be summed up as Orlando meets The Mission.
A Basque woman who, in the early 1600s, escaped a convent and fled for the Spanish colonies of the Americas disguised as a man named Antonio, de Erauso fought in wars in Chile and Peru, engaged in duels, traded goods and travelled the globe – all of it detailed in (highly embellished) memoirs that made de Erauso a sensation when he returned to Spain, where he later received a royal pension and a papal dispensation to continue dressing as a man.
Camara’s novel begins with Antonio deep in the jungles of the new world, where he has gone to escape the clutches of a sadistic Spanish captain and his living-hell of a barracks, which centre around a constantly burning bonfire of Indian bodies that result in “a pink, waxy lagoon of white skeletons, like stiff trees in a saltpeter bed.”
Antonio’s motley companions, their presence gradually explained, include horses, mules, monkeys, a dog named Red and two Guarani slave girls who pepper him with questions about his Catholic faith.
Our hero’s audacious backstory is revealed through the device of a long letter, which Antonio furiously writes, whenever he gets the chance, to his prioress aunt back at the convent in Spain. The letter is both confession and an act of contrition: 20 years of soldiering in the colonies means Antonio’s hands, and sword, aren’t particularly clean either.
Antonio’s becoming a man (a process enabled, in his telling, by an intimate encounter with a bear) turns out to be just the first of the novel’s metamorphoses. The closer he and the girls get to their Guarani home, the Spanish army in hot pursuit, destroying the jungle as they go, the more the environment absorbs and transforms our trio, not to mention Camara’s lushly mesmeric and seamlessly translated prose.
