On 10 December 2021 we read pages from Paola Masino’s Nascita e morte della massaia (Milan: ISBN, 2009), in particular from chapter 2 (pp. 14-20), chapter 5 (pp. 98-101), and chapter 6 (pp. 120-123). We used Marella Feltrin-Morris’ translation (Paola Masino, Birth and Death of the Housewife, New York: SUNY Press, 2010; pp. 24-28, 87-90, 107-109).

Masino’s novel, written between 1938 and 1939, was first published as a volume in 1945. It is a fierce attack against marriage and motherhood, and against the confined role of the housewife, or angel of the home, assigned to women for centuries and re-inculcated in them by the early-twentieth-century bourgeois society and the Fascist regime. You could say that it is an early feminist work, yet Masino defies specific labels, and in the 1945 author’s note at the end of the volume, she refers to her book as “this portrait of a woman, which already seems so distant from me that I can barely recognize it.”

What readers never fail to feel is the energy, and irony, and sarcasm, in Masino’s writing, from the very beginning, when the Housewife, from her cradle-trunk full of breadcrumbs and books, questions her mother and investigates the world, making everyone uncomfortable, until the very end, when society, with its values and institutions, has made the Housewife uncomfortable – the Housewife who never rests in peace, not even in her grave.

The novel combines various literary genres and forms, including drama, personal diary, and the fantastic. Among the many passages here is one that is both surreal and vitriolic; but we’ll cut it to the surreal vision, not to make the quote too long:

“the war suggested a dream to me […] I was on the porch, watching paratroopers jump from invisible airplanes. The sky, filled with tiny raining men and white umbrellas, looked like the sea in summertime, when jellyfish migrate. As they came down and sailed around me, the paratroopers remained stuck in taut clothes lines. Kicking their feet in the air, they all yelled at me, while I ran from one to the other showing them the laundry and protesting: “Don’t you recognize your shirt? Here are your handkerchiefs. Who watches over your sleep if not I? Who always makes sure you find fresh laundered sheets on your bed? What are you complaining about? Who are you yelling at? […] You fly, and we remain on the ground. […] And in fact, after dangling for a while on the clotheslines, now with a soft bounce the aviators rose and spread again all over the sky. They looked like round yawns let our by the air.”

[Listen to this extract in Italian:]

If it were a painting, Masino’s book would be Max Ernst’s The Angel of the Home or the Triumph of Surrealism, painted in 1937.

On 29 November 2021 we read pages from Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (Torino: Einaudi, 1979), in particular the very beginning (pp. 3-4) and from chapter 7 (pp. 153, 155-156). We used William Weaver’s translation (Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1981; pp. 3-4, 153, 155-56 [this is not a mistake: yes, the page numbers are incredibly the same as in the Italian edition].

Calvino’s book was first published in 1979. It is a novel in a post-structuralist, post-modernist vein, one that plays very much on form and exposes, so to speak, the process of writing (or rather, in this case, of reading) and the artificial nature of literature. Yet it is also a book about the pleasure(s) of reading, and those amongst us who have read it in its entirety agreed that, once they began reading it, they could not stop.

There is a remarkable scene when the male Reader and the female Reader (two “functions” and two “characters” at the same time) mate – it is perhaps one of the least sexually arousing sexual encounters in literature. Here, reading and mating are the same:

“And you too, O [male] Reader, are meanwhile an object of reading: the Other [female] Reader now is reviewing your body as if skimming the index.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian:]

But they are also different:

“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies […] differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous, divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian:]

This is also a book about the beginning, or beginnings. When does a story begin? But, once again, what are we talking about? A love story, or a literary story? Or our love for literature?

“To begin. You’re [the] one who said it, […] [female Reader]. But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot,” writes Calvino.

[Listen to this quote in Italian:]

Have you read this book?