Tightfisted beauty
Newly translated fiction by Lalla Romano and Dacia Maraini
A Silence Shared
Lalla Romano, translated by Brian Robert Moore
Pushkin Press, pp. 192, 21 February 2023
Lalla Romano’s spare 1957 novel traces the encounter between two couples hiding in Northern Italy near the end of World War II. By her mutual affection with Ada and Paolo, the narrator is absorbed into a provisional community destined to disband in unison with the German occupation. She reflects, “I knew for sure that nothing like this would ever have happened in real life.” By Romano’s account, war is misery, desperation, desolation, abandonment. It invokes a sense of “bewildered loss” which, in its universality, begets “something sweet.” War is not real life.
This novel of images (Romano was a painter before the war) is striking because those images seem to recede sharply just as soon as they’ve come into relief. I’m thinking of the narrator’s visit to the apartment where Paolo is staying in Turin. They dine together on his meager provisions in a scene that would certainly be vital if we were to read A Silence Shared as a novel overtly concerned with plot. Instead, once established, the scene dissolves into the occasion of it being recounted to Ada. The immediacy of a meal shared with a loved one is cut through by the narrator’s self-consciousness and by time’s lack of sentimental consideration. We’re in the realm of echos and reflections. Dreams (which are always “in some way dictated by me”) meld with memory. There’s something melancholy and touching about this place.
“It’s true that when the end already seems near, there is always still a stretch of time left,” says the narrator. Romano is interested in what we make of that interim, and our strange capacity to resist change even in the midst of desolation. Reading A Silence Shared, I felt that so much of the profound romance we crave is fated to a sort of liminal, suggestive existence. A man shares pears with Ada and the narrator on a train journey. She reflects, very simply, “The goodness of this man revived us.” Perhaps we should seek love’s vivifying effects in small gestures, silences and shadows. Who are we to demand that everything be laid out on the surface? Romano is an unusual writer in her intuitive understanding of this position, and the ease with which she permits language its limitations.
In Praise of Disobedience: Claire of Assisi, A Novel
Dacia Maraini, translated by Jane Tylus
Rutgers University Press, pp. 250, 13 January 2023
Dacia Maraini’s In Praise of Disobedience (2013) is another—albeit wildly divergent—novel concerned with silence, dreams, and meaning-making outside of time. The novel is woven together by three women: Chiara, a young Sicilian hoping to understand herself vis-a-vis the saint from whom she took her name, the unnamed writer she appeals to for narrative assistance in this venture, and their shared subject, Saint Clare of Assisi. Through letters and diary entries, readers are immersed in the writer’s process of enlivening Saint Clare through research and bold stretches of imagination.
In the midst of one query, the writer says this: “Enough of these irreverent thoughts. No one has ever posed these problems with respect to a saint. Yet such issues were real, the stuff of daily life, and they had nothing to do with prayer and meditation.” The narrative unfolds in dialogue with scholarly and classical texts, including Clare’s own letters and poetry. The writer dreams, again and again, about Clare. In attempting to get closer to her subject, there is no suggestion that one type of attention—scholarly or psychic—is more valuable than the other. She fervently wishes for Clare to answer for herself as a woman, above all else. Why did she choose the convent? Why insist on inflicting so much pain upon one’s own body? Behind her nominal desire to experience martyrdom in Morocco, didn’t there linger a more decipherable desire for novelty? She wants Clare, with her calloused feet and sickly body, to bleed beyond the outlines of her canonical portrait. After all, “What virtue is there in being born already perfect and holy?”
There’s this recurring image: nuns’ writings locked away in rotting convent drawers—an entire classical tradition lost. The writer fantasizes about the day when women’s mystical writings will be prized alongside those unquestioned classics written by men. Indeed, Maraini succeeds in prodding us toward a reassessment of “women’s literature” through her unconventional narrative structure and energetic encounter with a wide range of sources (Aristotle, Pinocchio). I sensed deep generosity in Maraini’s recurrent deference to the witnesses to Saint Clare’s canonization, nuns who lived with her at San Damiano. Muddled by time and constrained by the task at hand (the pressing question of Clare’s happiness, for instance, would have hardly been relevant), the women were imperfect narrators and yet, all the same, storytellers engaged in worthwhile literary projects of their own.
