This is pretty cool: Goliarda Sapienza’s huge novel The Art of Joy, in English translation for the first time by Anne Milano Appel and published by Picador.
Their blurb:
Rejected by a series of publishers, abandoned in a chest for twenty years, Goliarda Sapienza’s masterpiece, The Art of Joy, survived a turbulent path to publication. It wasn’t until 2005, when it was released in France, that this novel received the recognition it deserves. At last, Sapienza’s remarkable book is available in English.
The Art of Joy centers on Modesta, a Sicilian woman born in 1900 whose strength and character are an affront to conventional morality. Impoverished as a child, Modesta believes she is destined for a better life. She is able, through grace and intelligence, to secure marriage to an aristocrat without compromising her own deeply felt values, and revels in upsetting the rules of her fascist, patriarchal society. This is the history of the twentieth century seen through the perspective of one extraordinary woman.
Got into a bit of it this weekend and it looks like good stuff; if your interest is piqued, you might want to check out Emily Cooke’s New Yorker piece for more. From Cooke’s essay:
What exactly the art of joy consists of isn’t immediately evident. At the outset, the novel reads less like a handbook on happiness than like a sadomasochistic Italian novelization of “The Joy of Sex.” It opens with a girl, called Modesta, who is born in 1900, in Sicily, to modest circumstances and immodest predilections, masturbating to the screams of a resented disabled sister, whom Modesta fantasizes is deliberately rending her own flesh. Masturbation gives way to cunnilingus by a tall neighbor boy, which gives way to intercourse, with Modesta’s deflowering, at the age of nine, by a stranger who claims to be her father. Perhaps the “joy” part hasn’t begun yet. But, wait, she rather likes it, at least until he sticks “something hard … into the hole where the pee-pee came out.” Immediately after the rape, the family’s hut goes up in flames, the casualty of a fire that Modesta has lit accidentally/on purpose. The worst casualties are Modesta’s sister and mother, locked in a bedroom by the prodigal father. Modesta has a chance to unlock them; she does not take it. The father is gone for good. Dispatched to a convent, this “poor tormented child,” as the nuns gullibly call her, fakes seizures in order to secure the comforting bosom of the Mother Superior, Leonora, who likes to titillate herself and her charge with stories of the persecuted Saint Agatha. Her bosom, St. Agatha’s was torn from her chest with “red-hot forceps” and “arranged … warm and tremulous, on a silver tray.” The lurid description gives Modesta “a thrill of pleasure” “so intense and protracted” that she has to grit her teeth to avoid a cry. When she discovers that the nun won’t put out—Leonora ventures only a “few timid caresses” and punishes Modesta for having witnessed her masturbating—infatuation turns to anger. “I hate her, I hate her,” she shrieks, alone in her cell, then brings herself to orgasm. All this before Modesta has reached the age of eighteen, and the book a tenth of its length.
The old avant-garde has passed and left no successors. We continue to live off its capital but the community has broken up and the standards are no longer respected. The crisis in America is especially severe. Our creators are too isolated or too integrated. Most of them merge gracefully into Midcult, feeling they must be part of “the life of our time,” whatever that means (I should think it would be ambitious enough to try to be part of one’s own life), and fearful of being accused of snobbishness, cliqueism, negativism, or worst of all, practicing “art for art’s sake” (though for what better sake?) Some revolt, but their work tends toward eccentricity since it lacks contact with the past and doesn’t get support from a broad enough intelligentsia in the present. The two currently most prominent groups, the “action painters” and the beatnik academy of letters, differ from the old avant-garde in two interesting ways They are cut off from the tradition: the works of Joyce and Picasso, for instance, show an extraordinary knowledge of (and feeling for) the achievements of the past, while those of the beats and the actionists, for instance, do not. And they have had too much publicity too soon; the more they try to shock the Midcult’s audience, the more they are written up in the Lucepapers; they are “different,” that potent advertising word whose charm reveals how monotonous the landscape of Midcult has become.
From Dwight Macdonald’s essay “Masscult and Midcult” (1960).
* * * * *
Viciousness is a bag with which man is born.
* * * * *
A lady looking like a fish standing on its head; her mouth like a slit, one longs to put a penny in it.
* * * * *
Russians abroad: the men love Russia passionately, but the women don’t like her and soon forget her.
* * * * *
Chemist Propter.
* * * * *
Rosalie Ossipovna Aromat.
* * * * *
It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
* * * * *
And she began to engage in prostitution, got used to sleeping on the bed, while her aunt, fallen into poverty, used to lie on the little carpet by her side and jumped up each time the bell rang; when they left, she would say mindingly, with a pathetic grimace; “Something for the chamber-maid.” And they would tip her sixpence.
* * * * *
Prostitutes in Monte Carlo, the whole tone is prostitutional; the palm trees, it seems, are prostitutes, and the chickens are prostitutes.
* * * * *
We acted the cliché. We melted with laughter. Not the prickly melt that comes from sitting on a hot stove but the cool relaxing melt, in defiance of chemistry, like dropping deep into a liquid feather bed. We did not know or remember the reason for laughing. There was a film, yes: a dumb sad man with hair like wheat and round eyes like paddling pools; another man with a mustache like a toy hearth brush; and many other people and things—blondes, irate managers, stepladders, whitewash, all the stuff of farce. And there was a darkened opera house growing cardboard trees and shining wooden moons.
I shall never know why we laughed so much. Perhaps other films had been as funny, but this one seemed to contain for us a total laughter, a storehouse of laughter, like a hive where we children, spindly-legged as bees, would forever bring our foragings of fun to mellow and replenish this almost unbelievably collapsing mirth.
Nor was it the kind of laughter that cheats by turning in the end to tears, or by needing reinforcement with imagery. It was, simply, like being thrown on a swing into the sky, and the swing staying there, as in one of those trick pictures we had seen so often and marvelled at—divers leaping back to the springboard, horses racing back to the starting barrier. It was like stepping off the swing and promenading the sky.
After the film, we managed somehow to walk home. The afternoon was ragged with leaves and the dreary, hungry untidiness of a child’s half past four. Faces and streets seemed wet and serious. The hem of sky, undone, hung down dirty and gray.
But the laughter stayed with us, crippling, floating, rolling, aching, dissolving.
“It must have been a comic picture,” our mother said, not knowing, not knowing, when she saw our faces.
Read the rest of Janet Frame’s short story “A Night at the Opera.”
Biblioklept 