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The Sounds of Silence
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20173 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
3,378 Words |
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Charlotte Green
Charlotte Green, who lives in New York, writes frequently for
the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about literature and the arts. |
LA LUNGA VITA DI MARIANNA UNCRIA
(THE LONG LIFE OF MARIANNA UCRIA)
Dacia Maraini
Milano: RCS Rizzoli Libri S.p.A
265 pp. $30.00
Italian writer Dacia Maraini is an extraordinarily gifted poet, playwright, and novelist who deserves to be better known in North America. Her latest and most celebrated novel, as its title suggests, is about the life and times of Marianna Ucria, a woman for all seasons, who was born in Sicily two centuries ago.
Sicily then was still a feudal society, ruled by Spanish viceroys. Being respectable meant being rich. Being rich meant being noble, owning estates, lording it over hundreds of peasants dependent on the fecundity of the land. The church was the highest authority, the Inquisition as well established in Sicily as in Spain. Rank counted for everything, and every family that mattered including priest or nun, sometimes both. One could never be too well connected.
Girls were married in their teens, more often for the consolidation of land holdings than for connubial bliss. Weddings and christenings were occasions for lavish reunions, marked with days of feasting and fireworks. Servants were lifelong members of the household, with their own idiosyncrasies, intrigues, and hierarchy, as well as their own weaknesses, crimes, and misdemeanors.
New ideas were greeted with suspicion and hostility. The renaissance stopped at Sicily. It was only after 1734, when it had politically joined the Kingdom of Naples. that a bit of Italian, French, and British spice came to flavor the Sicilian stew.
Dacia Maraini brings that era to life with such brilliance and immediacy that it seems as if each scene is in Technicolor and the time is now. La Lunga Vita di Marianna Ucria, winner of Italy's Campiello Prize, has been translated for audiences in France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Japan, and Greece, with editions imminent in Czechoslovakia and Norway. So far, English-language copies are available only in Great Britain. (This review is based on the original Italian edition from Rizzoli)
Dacia Maraini's style is direct and lyrical. She controls language the way a maestro conducts an orchestra: Sicilian dialect to provide emphasis or to
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