One of Elena Ferrante's best 40 books by female writers When Maria, the fourth child of a widow, is adopted by the old and childless Bonaria Urrai, her life is instantly transformed - she finally has the love and affection she craves. But her new 'soul mother' is keeping something hidden from her, a secret life that is intimately bound-up with Sardinia's ancient traditions and customs. Midwife to the dying, easing their suffering and sometimes ending it, she is revered and feared in equal measure as the village's Accabadora. Bonaria tries to shield the girl from the truth about her role as an angel of mercy, until, moved by the pleas of a young man crippled in an accident, she breaks her golden rule of familial consent. The consequences - for Bonaria, for Maria and for the whole village, are devastating - and cause a rift between the two women that can only be bridge by another death. Translated from the Italian by Silvester Mazzarella
A selection of extracts from the prestigious MacLehose Press, an imprint specialising in the very best translated literary and crime fiction. From a hill station in the Himalayan foothills to the sweltering heat of downtown Buenos Aires; from the frozen lakes of far northern Sweden to the scarred cityscape of 1980s Beirut; from Breslau's sordid heyday to a kingdom that no longer exists. For five years the MacLehose Press has published fiction, non-fiction and crime from twenty languages - using the finest translators - alongside a distinguished few writers in English. This anthology brings together extracts from our backlist and from titles to be published in 2013. Many of these books are bestsellers in their own countries, and prizewinners of critical and popular acclaim. Romance, satire, elegy, mystery, murder, existential angst, the horrors of civil or colonial strife: if words can offer new worlds, you will find them in these pages. We invite you to sample a literary life less ordinary:
When Maria, the fourth child of a widow, is adopted by the old and childless Bonaria Urrai, her life is instantly transformed - she finally has the love and affection she craves. But her new 'soul mother' is keeping something hidden from her, a secret life that is intimately bound-up with Sardinia's ancient traditions and customs.
A travelogue revealing the hidden stories of Naples. In recent years Naples has become, for better or worse, the new destination in Italy. While many of its more unusual features are on display for all to see, the stories behind them remain largely hidden. In Marius Kociejowski’s portrait of this baffling city, the serpent can be many things: Vesuvius, the mafia-like Camorra, the outlying Phlegrean Fields (which, geologically speaking, constitute the second most dangerous area on the planet). It is all these things that have, at one time or another, put paid to the higher aspirations of Neapolitans themselves. Naples is simultaneously the city of light, sometimes blindingly so, and the city of darkness, although often the stuff of cliché. The boundary that separates death from life is porous in the extreme: the dead inhabit the world of the living and vice versa. The Serpent Coiled in Naples is a travelogue, a meditation on mortality, and much else besides.
A good overview of the archaeology and history of Sardinia from the earliest inhabitation on the island, through the prehistoric period to the Romans, late Roman, medieval and late medieval periods.
Indexes the Times, Sunday times and magazine, Times literary supplement, Times educational supplement, Times educational supplement Scotland, and the Times higher education supplement.
In this thesis I engage with the tradition of writing about the mother in order to explore how the representation of the mother-daughter relationship has evolved in the works of contemporary Italian women writers. Within the corpus of mother-daughter narratives, I have looked for novels that, departing from the dominant pattern characterised by maternal passivity and by the predominance of daughters' narrations, endowed the mother and the daughter with the same degree of agency.I have focused on the expression of maternal subjectivity and I demonstrate how select women writers have subverted the passive idealisation of the maternal figure by challenging the wide-spread representation of the mother as a silent object.I have chosen four novels, which allowed me to trace an evolution in the expression of the maternal voice, framed in a mother-daughter plot: Goliarda Sapienza's L'Arte della Gioia (1994 and 2008), Igiaba Scego's Oltre Babilonia (2008), Valeria Parrella's Lo Spazio Bianco (2008) and Michela Murgia's Accabadora (2009). While still placing a definite stress on the mother-daughter relationship, these texts present maternal models that challenge the male-dominated symbolic order, forge filial bonds outside of bloodlines and normative family paradigms, and widen the notion of motherhood to include tasks that do not necessarily hinge on child-rearing. Drawing from ancient Greek myth, psychoanalysis, feminist thought and literary theory I analyse how the experience of motherhood, disentangled from its bodily functions, becomes a relational practice, where the maternal perspective gradually emerges as dominant, although never completely severed from the daughter's.By redesigning the mother-daughter relationship, the novels discussed in the thesis also challenge the cultural context in which the mother-daughter plot is inscribed, revealing an underpinning logic that differs from a patriarchal symbolic through recurrent slippage between a patriarchal and a non-patriarchal frame of reference, which is, to some extent, consequential to their critique of maternal silence and passivity.
