Actress, prisoner and partisan: the weird lifetime of Goliarda Sapienza, the cursed author who discovered success after her loss of life | Culture | EUROtoday

In a tv interview from the Nineties, Goliarda Sapienza (Catania, Italy, 1924-1996) remembers the day she met the Czech author Milan Kundera. In it she talks about how a lot she loved being single throughout the years of the sexual revolution, till she went to mattress with the writer of The insufferable lightness of being: “He had become infatuated with me. But you could tell that he was used to the women of his country, who are two-meter tall women, while I am very small. He turned me around in bed a thousand times and left me dismembered.” The episode, which she recounted with laughter and a degree of satisfaction, completely summarizes the persona of Sapienza, a author with a weird life who didn’t acquire the deserved recognition in her nation till after her loss of life. 2025, alternatively, has been a yr of revenge. From his most well-known work, The artwork of pleasurea multi-award-winning tv collection was tailored (out there on SkyShowtime), whereas this Friday it premieres in Spanish theaters life outdoorsa biographical movie about his time in a Roman jail.

To perceive the life and works of Sapienza, it’s higher to begin on the finish. The author died on the age of 72, fully impoverished. Theirs was a scandalous existence, outdoors the social norms of a moralistic and patriarchal nation. Her means of being was partially what denied her in life the popularity that different modern writers, comparable to Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg, did obtain. Everything she had gathered throughout her profession as an actress and narrator was spent all through the 30 years that handed from when she started writing her masterpiece till the day it was lastly printed, after her loss of life. The artwork of pleasure (printed in Spain by Lumen with translation by José Ramón Monreal) was destined to be a cursed novel.

There is not any consensus on the explanations behind this rejection. When Sapienza completed the novel she was not a stranger. Born in Sicily throughout Twenty years A fascist, she was the daughter of a socialist lawyer and the primary girl to achieve the management of the principle Italian union. Her title, which made her inimitable, was inherited from her father’s eldest son, his half-brother Goliardo, murdered by the mafia three years earlier than his delivery. She was a partisan throughout the Nazi occupation of Rome, and a movie and theater actress within the following decade. For a few years he shied away from writing, contemplating it too unstable a strategy to make a residing, till in 1967 he printed his first novel (Open letterunpublished in Spanish), through which he portrays his childhood and adolescence in a household of socialists oppressed by the fascist regime.

“Sapienza is a fundamental author of the 20th century who has not been as widely read in Spain as other contemporary authors. I think this is due, at least in part, to the fact that she was always incisive and confronted power and the masculine,” explains David Gargallo, editor of Altamarea, which in Spanish publishes the Italian’s second novel. At the sting of midday (translated by Melina Márquez), and is engaged on a brand new version of one other title, The Rebibbia jail. When he wrote this primary ebook, Sapienza had simply gone via a interval of despair. Through conversations together with her physician—with whom she had a relationship—she affords essentially the most intimate testimony about her life, together with her admission to a psychiatric hospital after a suicide try and the electroshock therapies she was subjected to throughout her keep on the heart.

a cursed novel

Until then, all his work was biographical. Things change if you begin writing The artwork of pleasurewhich took 10 years to complete and one other 20 years to publish. It may be very possible that the scandalous features of the plot have influenced it. “Those were years of return to order after ’68, we had to leave the sexual revolution behind. Nobody understood the value, nor wanted to take the risk of publishing such an original, free and unconventional novel,” explains Maria Rizzarelli, literature professor on the University of Catania.

The novel tells the story of Modesta, a significant and uncomfortable girl who challenges the patriarchal, fascist and oppressive tradition of her time. Born on January 1, 1900 in one of many poorest areas of the nation (the identical Sicily as Sapienza), she is shipped to a convent after being sexually assaulted by her father. Not having the slightest non secular vocation, she manages to flee the management of the nuns and leads to the house of a noble household, the place her Machiavellian intelligence and some matricides enable her to change into an aristocrat and the matriarch of the palace. A Madame Bovary o Anna Karenina within the Italian fashion, however with an abysmal distinction: Sapienza provides his heroine absolutely the originality of ending her story joyful, with out having to surrender on life.

“It was a book that was too different from what women wrote in those years, but above all from what the editors wanted women to write. Modesta does not have any sacred respect for institutional forms, such as the family,” explains Gigliola Sulis, professor of Italian literature on the University of Leeds. One of essentially the most controversial features of the novel is exactly the sentimental and sexual relationships of the protagonist, who falls in love with women and men, has extra lovers on the identical time and creates a household – which right now can be outlined as queer— which isn’t based mostly merely on blood ties, however on elections. “The reasons why we fell in love with Goliarda today are the same reasons why it didn’t work in those years: it was too provocative, too modern,” provides Sulis.

The actor Angelo Pellegrino, the author’s husband, is the one who did essentially the most to make sure that The artwork of pleasure noticed the sunshine. In 1994, two years earlier than Sapienza’s loss of life, he managed to get the primary a part of the novel printed, simply 200 of the 700 pages that give life to Modesta’s story. Alessandra Trevisan, a scholar on the University of Venice and writer of two monographs on Sapienza, believes that, along with the matters mentioned, the rejection of this monumental work can also be as a consequence of editorial elements. One is unquestionably the size of the ebook, which the Sicilian by no means agreed to chop. But additionally her stubbornness in eager to publish with a first-class writer, when she was not a longtime author, regardless of the modest success of her first two novels.

Prisoner for jewellery theft

Nor did the notoriety she gained after being imprisoned assist enhance her picture. In 1980 she was arrested for stealing some jewellery from the home of a wealthy and aristocratic buddy, and spent just a few days within the Rebibbia ladies’s jail, one of the inflexible penitentiary facilities in Rome. As he later stated, he had really wished to dwell the expertise of jail. Apparently she intentionally left clues to be found. It was a world that she had heard advised about since she was a toddler by her dad and mom and siblings, who as anti-fascist militants went via jail with satisfaction.

Also on a stylistic degree, this expertise was very optimistic for the author, as she herself recalled within the well-known interview she gave on public tv just a few years later. “Unfortunately, they took me out too early. I wanted to stay longer, because in the time I spent in Rebibbia I managed to improve my language, which had become too gentrified,” he defined. It was per week that modified his life, from which emerged The Rebibbia jail (edited by Rata in 2021, with translation by Celia Filipetto), one of many writer’s most appreciated books, though it had the impact of distancing her even farther from the cultural world of which she had been a component earlier than obsessively secluding herself to write down The artwork of pleasure.

Most possible, all of those causes contributed in a roundabout way to the rejection. Luck started to vary for Sapienza in 2005, when Modesta’s story turned a publishing success in France. The ebook was printed once more in Italy, this time by a big writer, and have become a longsellerwhich steadily sells about 10,000 copies every year.

Today, it’s far more tough to search out somebody who has not heard of Sapienza in Italy. The rediscovery is attributed partially to the celebrations for the centenary of his delivery, however above all to the variations of his two best-known works. In March of this yr it was launched in theaters and on platforms The artwork of happinessa collection in six episodes that, after passing via the Cannes competition, received a few of the major movie awards within the transalpine nation. And just a few months later, the director of the collection, Valeria Golino, returned to the French metropolis as an actress, enjoying Sapienza in Mario Martone’s movie life outdoorswhich recovers the writer’s adventures in jail.

It is not any coincidence that the artist is on the heart of the 2 audiovisual tasks which have the benefit of getting introduced Sapienza again to the current. The actress all the time felt that she owed a debt of recognition to the author, who within the final years of her life helped a younger Golino put together for a task that received her the Volpi Cup on the Venice competition. life outdoors It handed unnoticed at Cannes, however the performances of Golino and his feminine co-stars achieved essential acclaim in Italy. “In America they would surely have made a film about that trial of mine… Even humorous,” Sapienza joked within the eighties. Then I could not think about that nearly half a century later a former pupil was going to do it justice.