as though she were fed up with so much foolishness - Unmarried Women in Naples

Scott at seraillon has been reading Italian literature this year, like I have, except more widely and deeply and etc.  Today we cross paths with the 1885 Unmarried Women, an accurately titled collection of short story-like texts by prolific Neapolitan journalist, editor, publisher, etc. Matilde Serao.

I understand there has been some recent interest in fiction about women in Naples.  People with such an interest should read Unmarried Women.  Maybe there will be a Serao revival.  Maybe two blog posts count as a revival.

Serao loves crowds.  She fills her scenes with people, with those unmarried women, whether the setting is a girl’s school on exam day, a religious festival with fireworks, a line to enter the bathhouses at a public beach, or, in Serao’s greatest stroke, the State Telegraph Office (Women’s Section).  Here the women are eavesdropping, so to speak, on a mushy love-telegram:

The girls all listened intently: Ida Torelli, the skeptic, snickered; Caterina Borelli, the wit, shrugged her shoulders, as though she were fed up with so much foolishness.  But the others were rather moved by this incandescent telegraphic prose and were already whispering about their own loves, for better or for worse.  Adelina Mark, the beauty, had two or three admirers she couldn’t stand, instead …  Peppina Sanna thought about her handsome naval officer…  Maria Morra, the amateur actress…  Annina Pescara…  (“The State Telegraph Office,” 145)

Those ellipses all hide interesting things, but I want to emphasize the bombardment by people.  Serao can be a little hard to follow.  Giovanni Verga did the same thing in The House by the Medlar Tree (1881), and he does it again in Mastro-Don Gesualdo (1889), all of the characters introduced at once.  If you are thinking of doing this in your own fiction, I tell you, it is hard to follow.

However, Serao follows the characters from story to story.  A number of the women working in the miserable telegraph office in the fourth story are able to work there because they passed their exams back in the first story.  Serao shows the same characters at school, work, parties, and so on.  The book is structured a lot like an ensemble television drama, with different “episodes” emphasizing the family or love life of different characters, with occasional pure ensemble pieces, like the zippy, exhausting episode about the telegraph office on election night.  A TV series about the young women working in the Neapolitan telegraph office in 1880, how would that not be great?

So eventually I pulled the mass of characters apart, is what I am saying.  One of them, the sassy bookworm, “the wit” up above, is, the introduction tells me, the author before she was an author, “a bit overweight, ‘nasty as a fat monkey,’ ‘a shameless sleepyhead, glasses slipping down her pug nose, given to too much reading: in short, a nerd” – I am quoting Scott’s post.

The women are often, but not always, desperate and miserable.  The depiction of Naples as a lived-in city is by itself valuable, a great contrast to the wealthy tourist cities I saw in The Portrait of a Lady.  The telegraph office was of especially high interest, but I read it all with pleasure.  How to make good fiction out of kids waiting in line to go the beach?  Serao did it.  A lot of people would like this book.

Paula Spurlin Paige is the translator.  The translation is recent, from 2007, so it is not well known yet.  Once again, I will point to seraillon, whose post is three times longer, has better quotations, and is decorated with relevant illustrations.

Now every heart is glad, and far and wide / Rises once more the rumour / of work as it once did - when Italian literature acquired an Italy

I have switched to the J. G. Nichols translation of Leopardi.  The title is from Canto XXIV, “The Calm after the Storm.”  I have finally gotten to the point where there is a united Italy.  And Italian literature expands.

Giovanni Verga – I want to revisit and read more of his stories of hard times in Sicily, like those in Little Novels of Sicily (1883), and I also want to try at least one of his novels, either The House by the Medlar Tree (1881) or Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889) or both.

Luigi Pirandello was also from Sicily.  The major plays for which he is best known are from the 1920s and 1930s, too late for me – as  usual I want to choke off my reading somewhere around World War I – but The Late Mattia Pascal, a novel, is early, from 1904.  Somebody will have to tell me what else is especially good.  I like the sound of Shoot: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1915).  Pirandello is the first Nobelist I will mention in this post.

Grazia Deledda (she’s the second) is Sardinian.  I would likely enjoy her novels just for their unusual setting, but I assume they have more to offer than that.  After the Divorce (1902) and Elias Portulu (1903) are in my local library, which is encouraging.  Deledda is another reason my attention had turned to Italy.

Matilde Serao is associated with Rome and Naples – I’m back on the boot – where she was a journalist and novelist.  The fairly recent short story collection Unmarried Women looks most promising to me, but there are a large number of novels in English published a hundred years ago.  Ford Madox Ford, whose taste is eccentric but who seems to have read everything, recommends Conquest of Rome, Desire of Life, and In the Country of Jesus (see The March of Literature. p. 859).  Unlikely, but life is full of surprises.

I think of Italo Svevo as a 20th century writer because of Zeno’s Conscience (1923), but his first two novels, A Life (1892) and As a Man Grows Older (1898), are much earlier.  I have read the latter but remember nothing more than that I thought it was pretty good.  I would appreciate advice on the former.  Svevo at this point was not actually in Italy, since Trieste was part of Austria.  Another marginal region raising its voice.

Back to Tuscany, the old center of Italy, to remind anyone interested of the Pinocchio (1883) readalong at Simpler Pastimes scheduled for later this month.  Just 200 pages, including illustrations, written for tiny little children.  So easy to join in.

The poets are more of a problem.  20th century Italian poetry strikes me as very strong – Italian fiction, too – but the period before the war is either weaker or poorly represented in English.

The great figure is Giosuè Carducci (Nobel #3), but even in Italian he seems to have lost some of his status, as if squeezed between the great 20th century poets and Leopardi.  The 1994 Selected Poems shows off Carducci well.  It includes his long ode Hymn to Satan (1865), which is not what the title suggests.  One of Carducci’s major collections, The Barbarian Odes (1877-89), is also available in English, but it is one of the worst translations I have ever come across.

A number of poets began publishing during or just after the war.  I hope to read Dino Campana, who wrote just one wild visionary book, Orphic Songs (1914), then, sadly, spent the rest of his life in mental hospitals.  I have my eye on Umberto Saba, too.  Move the cutoff just a bit later and lots of interesting writers pop up.

Look how efficient I was today.  Tomorrow I will end with the hard cases.  If you have advice on Gabrielle D’Annunzio or Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, let’s save it for a day – I do want it.  Then I will browse through some books I won’t read and take a glance at the 20th century.

Five days for all of this.  In my defense, it is an exciting literature.  Even in the 19th century, exciting.