Description:
In Italy, as in most Western cultures, the 1960s was a dynamic and turbulent decade of social change. Dacia Maraini, in this short story collection, explores the vexing, tragic, and often humorous experiences of women living in modern urban Italy.
With a style as lean as Samuel Beckett's, and a love of the absurd that rivals Eugène Ionesco, Maraini's stories are both poignant and wickedly funny. The writer's ironic lens zooms in to examining sexual relations, working conditions, women's issues, and family dynamics, illuminating the lives of an entire generation. With classic existential angst, Maraini's characters are often profoundly dissatisfied with their situations, but also ill-equipped to initiate any real change. This feminist version of the absurd is deliciously wry and terrible. The stories have a real bite.
Originally published as Mio marito in 1968, this is the first English translation of My Husband.
Brief description:
Vera Golini emigrated with her family to Canada from Abruzzo in 1956. She has been a professor of Italian studies at St. Jerome's University since 1975, and since 1997 has also directed the Women's Studies program at the University of Waterloo. She is currently president of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies.
Review Quotes: Originally published in 1968 as Mio Marito, this collection of 17 short stories offers a compelling, often disturbing vision of the lives of women in urban Italy during the 1960s. Maraini explores, in a spare and ironic style, fundamental feminist issues of gender roles, identity, sexuality, and violence against women. Society's collusion in the oppression of women in working relationships, through the family dynamic, and in sexual relations comes under her intense scrutiny. While many of Maraini's stories are dark and her characters come to a tragic or absurd end, others are wickedly humorous, particularly those in which she treads a fine line between the comic and the absurd.... Vera Golini's translation is true to the spirit of the original.... But Golini offers us much more than a translation: she includes a succinct critical introduction, a detailed afterword on Maraini's life and prose, a number of useful appendixes, and a critical bibliography. Thus, this edition of My Husband will not only appeal to a general reading public, but it will also provide invaluable assistance to scholars and students interested in contemporary and comparative literature, cultural studies, women's studies, and feminism.-- "Canadian Book Review Annual, 2006, 2007 February"