LMarch 8 has just reminded us that patriarchal culture endures among us. Even today we are “hostages” of the duties between being the caring woman that society wants and the person we feel we are. The 4 books to read of the week also reveal it. In Bang Bang Mussolini when women ended up victims of a label, which was also a sentence, the doors of the asylum were opened for them… .
1/ Books to read. Lifetime friends
Why read it
Valentina, Cristiana and Arianna are thirty years old and have been friends since high school. Their personalities couldn’t be more different: Valentina is accomplished and perfect, married to the ideal man and engaged in a successful career; Cristiana is restless and emotional, surrounded by the affection of a complicated family and tormented by an unhappy love; Arianna, free soul and dreamer, has just become a mother.
Suddenly, however, their lives change: pain, illness and betrayal enter their daily lives by force, exposing contradictions and weaknesses. In the new path that the three will have to face, they will discover that they are different, they will feel distant.
And if tragedy is around the corner, they are not able to see it. Yet, dealing with it will become the only way forward to become a woman.
Friends of a lifetime is a bildungsroman, growth and friendship novel, a story about who has the strength to carry on and who instead gets sucked in, about the will to take back one’s life and give it meaning, even when it seems too late.
Info. Beatrice Mariani. Lifetime friends. Sperling & Kupfer.
2/ Our best
Why read it
Claudia knows only one way to defend herself. She walks armed with her tattoos, piercings and the music that rumbles from her earphones. Only in this way does she feel protected from the anger that has accompanied her since she was a child. Grew up quickly, with no one to teach her how to be a “child”, Claudia lives every day with the cumbersome weight of her memories. When she was just a little girl, an accident put an end to the cries inside her house but also to her childhood, digging an unbridgeable distance between her and her mother Caterina.
A distance that made her lonely, a suburban animal that only her patient Aunt Dora and her best friend Vio manage to bridge, one by listening, the other by joining in the hubbub of a “reckless life” on the streets of Brianza. Yet, having become a mother, Claudia feels that something is not right, in her memories. Her vision of her father’s accident “haunts” her, even though many years have passed, and between mother and her daughter there remains a wall of silence that only an act of courage can demolish.
With the tenacity of someone who has nothing to lose, Claudia will return to that dead and never buried past, discovering that facts and truths almost never coincide, and that a possibility of a future can blossom between the two. Carmela Scotti was a finalist for the Calvino Award with The imperfect.
Info. Carmela Scotti. Our best. Garzanti.
3/ Books to read. The tree and the vine
3/ Books to read. The tree and the vine
“To me that’s where the war started, in Erica’s room.”
The friendship between Bea and Erica turns into an unmentionable love for those times and, only when she discovers that Erica is in grave danger – because she is half Jewish and has joined the resistance -, Bea finally manages to accept the attraction which pushes her towards her.
They are two profoundly different women: almost passive, with her head on her shoulders, conscientious Bea; impetuous, free, stubborn and careless Erica (journalist at Niewes Post). She stubborn to the point that in order to stay in the Netherlands with a new flame she frustrates the only possibility that she will have to escape to the USA (but I don’t want to tell her anything else).
Both, however, of an incredible modernity. Like their relationship on the other hand.
And the historical background creeps into their daily lives little by little, through Erica’s mother who adheres to the National Socialist movement, the newspaper where Erica works which increasingly takes on a pro-Nazi drift, petty denunciations, impossible loves, an increasingly unrecognizable Amsterdam.
Before being released in the Netherlands in 1954, the book was rejected because it was considered “scandalous”. Later, it became a classic of Dutch literature.
Info. Dola De Jong. The tree and the vine. The new frontier.
4/ Books to read. Bang Bang Mussolini
Why read it
The book traces the story of Lucia Joyce, and that of other women who, like her, were victims of a label that was also a sentence, that of madness and hysteria. Women under the clutches of men curious to understand, but with few tools to do it. Women victims of an obtuse patriarchy and social rules aimed at supporting it.
Among these Lady Violet Gibson, the woman who in 1926 made an attempt on Mussolini’s life.
A book steeped in history that is a hymn to freedom, the power of the imagination and the feminist struggle. An alienating and poetic journey in search of a normality that undermines dogmas and comfortable preconceptions. Normality in madness.
“The scenery out there is beautiful. Under the trees in the park of St Andrew’s Hospital, a woman looks into space and raises her arms to the sky, calling the birds to her to give them seeds and crumbs. It is Lady Violet Gibson, now at the end of her days, many of which were spent here, locked up in this luxury asylum for having made an attempt on the life of Benito Mussolini way back in 1926. ”
Info. Anna Vaught. Bang Bang Mussolini. 8tto editions.
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