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First published in Italy in 1921, this short novel is a dark, grim account of two Sicilian women's voluntary imprisonment in the elder's dull, dour marriage. Sisters Nicolina and Antonietta see their chance to flee their small Italian village when Don Lucio announces his intentions to marry Antonietta. They envision a grand life for themselves in Lucio's large, gloomy house in the city--but their taste of freedom proves fleeting. Nicolina dwindles to an unpaid drudge for her sister's family, while Antonietta fares only slightly better as a wife-of-all-work and beleaguered mother. Together the housebound pair ministers to the touchy Don (a domineering, wily paterfamilias and likely crook whose cunning they barely sense) and withers gradually in servitude. After the Don seduces Nicolina, the sisters' friendship ends, and further tragedy intrudes in the self-inflicted death of Antonietta's young son. Though dated in her fairy-tale-like simplicity of character, Messina, who died in 1944, wrote with courage and understated strength of a narrow, prototypically female life singed by masochistic fury.
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Dall'isola al continente le opere della scrittrice siciliana Maria Messina (1887-1944) ruotano attorno a figure femminili che rappresentano un momento di transizione segnato dalle possibilita e dalle incertezze della fine di un'epoca - storica, sociale e letteraria - e l'inizio di una nuova.
Nel 1903 l’allora sedicenne palermitana Maria Messina giunse a Mistretta, Comune dei Monti Nebrodi in provincia di Messina, dove dimorò con la famiglia fino al 1909. Attratta dalle tante storie che sentiva raccontare, metabolizzando le umane vicissitudini in accorto e personale stile letterario, in tale periodo scrisse molte novelle che andarono a riempire le pagine dei suoi primi due libri (Pettini fini e Piccoli gorghi) e di altre successive raccolte di novelle. Da tale scaturigine che fissa i contorni della permanenza della scrittrice, questo libro racconta le molteplici iniziative attivate a Mistretta a seguito della sua riscoperta letteraria (dalla annuale celebrazione in concomitanza del concorso letterario a lei intestato alla istituzione di una via del centro storico, dalla cittadinanza onoraria alla tumulazione dei suoi resti mortali –riscoperti, a seguito di minuziosa indagine, a Pistoia in apposita urna collocata all’interno della tomba della madre- presso il locale cimitero monumentale).
Ten stories of impoverished Sicilian women in the early 20th century—“honed, polished, devastatingly direct . . . verismo at its unsentimental best” (Kirkus Reviews). The Sicilian writer Maria Messina’s captivating and brutal stories of the women of her home island are presented in a “lyrical and immediate” English translation by Elise Magistro (Publishers Weekly). Messina, who died in 1944, was the foremost female practitioner of verismo—the Italian literary realism pioneered by fellow Sicilian Giovanni Verga. Published between 1908 and 1928, Messina’s fiction represents the massive Sicilian immigration to America occurring at that time. The individuals in these stories are caught between the traditions they respect and a desire to move beyond them. Women are shuttered in their houses, virtual servants to their families, left behind while working men immigrate to the United States in fortune-seeking droves. A cultural album that captures the lives of peasant, working-class, and middle-class women, “Messina’s words will leave their mark. Their power makes them impossible to forget” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).