WHILE there is no shortage of translations of the masters of Italian fiction - Calvino, Moravia, Sciascia - the dearth of contemporary Italian voices finding their way into English might make one believe that there is not a lot happening in the world of Italian fiction. Not so, as these two volumes prove.
It is heartening to see a small, independent company (a rare thing in publishing these days) like Serpent's Tail taking the initiative in an area that is neither profitable nor popular. So a quick round of applause for the mere fact that these novels are available at a bookshop near you. And then on to Act One.
In Floria Tosca, Paola Capriolo takes as her inspiration Puccini's opera and transforms a melodramatic plot into a claustrophobic piece of theatre of cruelty.
In the opera, set in Rome in 1800, the police chief, Baron Scarpia, preys upon Tosca because she is the lover of the radical artist, Cavaradossi, whom the evil baron wishes to snare. Capriolo has developed the relationship between Scarpia and Tosca so that it becomes a pyschological cat-and-mouse game played out against the chilling background of the torture chamber.
Tosca initially comes to Scarpia to plead for Cavaradossi's life but the roles of hunter and hunted, supplicant and tyrant, become blurred when the antagonism between these two powerful characters is ignited by sexual passion.
Don't get the wrong idea, though. Capriolo's novel is as restrained as Puccini's opera is extravagant. Written in the form of a diary by Scarpia, discovered after his violent death at Tosca's hand, Capriolo's novel is cool, disengaged, yet utterly haunting. Scarpia's diary is a subtle and cerebral examination of his fascination with destructive love and his helplessness in the face of it. He watches his own downfall with a flinty, dispassionate gaze as his reluctant passion for Tosca turns to menacing obsession.
Capriolo creates a mood of gothic darkness and a deep sense of sexual unease in this minimalist tour-de-force.
It is interesting that Dacia Maraini should title her latest novel Voices, since her last novel but one, the immensely successful The Silent Duchess, concentrated on the theme of muteness. In this novel, which could be seen as a companion piece, a radio journalist, Michela Canova, is inundated by voices when she begins researching unsolved crimes against women after her neighbour, Angela Bari, is murdered.
In her taped interviews with Angela's family, with prostitutes who knew her, and the numerous case histories of violence she researches, Michela becomes a kind of echo chamber for the clamorous voice of wronged womanhood.
At one level, Voices works as a whodunnit; but at another, it is a highly polemical work, tracing in Michela the growth of a feminist consciousness as she confronts the victimhood of women in the face of male violence. And, Maraini insists, even empowered women like her heroine, Michela, have silences that hint at deep hurts at the hands of men.
This is not a happy novel; it paints a decidedly downbeat picture of contemporary Italian society and the gloom is leavened only by Maraini's large cast of endearing and eccentric cameo characters.
One small quibble. The biography of Maraini's which Serpent's Tail has used is merely an extended quote from the Guardian, which is strong on impressionism but short on facts. The reader is not even given basic information about Maraini's age so that she could be placed accurately in the canon of Italian fiction. (Maraini, by the way, was born in 1936.)
Apart from describing her as "Italy's most controversial writer", and listing some of her previous work, the only other achievement of Maraini's deemed worthy of note is that she was once Alberto Moravia's lover. Having granted Maraini her - rightful place as an important and influential Italian writer by this translation, it is a pity Serpent's Tail then proceed to reduce her in the next breath to an appendage of another writer - and a dead white male one at that.
