The forerunner word of Goliarda Sapienza

Christened by Natalia Ginzburg, in 1967, Lettera aperta stopped at the Strega Prize dozen. Ginzburg, who, in Goliarda Sapienza's ear and second ear, debased it to an 'unnecessarily cruel' novel. With those pages, however, Sapienza was anything but cruel and had the courage to judge her parents, heroes of the Resistance, as they acted in a 'stentorian', 'dogmatic', 'absolute' manner, on a par with the Fascists they had opposed. And without failing in her esteem and affection, the writer, originally from Catania, lucidly and decisively revealed the underlying link between Fascism, or rather, the proto-Fascism later theorised by Umberto Eco, and the petty-bourgeois ambition that with the economic boom prevailed over any other social perspective.

After 8 September 1943, her friends had split for equally radical reasons between those who took refuge in the mountains and those in Salò. According to her, it was imperative to realise the rift that had been created and not to be afraid to call it a 'civil war' in order to pacify the present.

A century after his birth, on 10 May 1924, The Autobiography of Contradictions (Einaudi, 2024, pp. 712, euro 20), edited by his husband Angelo Pellegrino, has been published, which opens with The Open Letter. During his lifetime, Sapienza was largely ignored and it was only after his death that various intellectuals dissolved their reservations to make positive pronouncements, whetted by the RAI spotlight. Essentially, five decades have passed since Vuoti di memoria (2002-2007), as Loredana Rotondo's docufilm is titled. Not surprisingly, it was recently shown and commented on at the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, during the May of Books event, organised by Rome's Il Talento association.

"The first twenty years of these forty years, by dint of consciously wanting to ignore them, have become so tangled up that I can't untangle them, can't put them in order. I am, unfortunately, very tidy, or rather, I would say a bit fixated. And so, in fact, the pasts are swatting me like a fly at the walls of this room, which has become too full. Il filo di mezzogiorno (1969), which in the aforementioned autobiography follows her debut book, tackled identity knots through the author's troubled move from Sicily to Rome, her drama courses and her harsh and ambiguous relationship with the psychoanalyst she turned to, knots that even Vittorini's pen had failed to unravel. Beyond the moral prejudices of the time and reflections on the fragility of the female condition, beyond the conflictual relationship with the opposite sex, especially in love, Sapienza's narrative evades psychoanalytic practice and the margins of the sheet, quiets the 'sharp terrors' of obscurity to acquire a unifying awareness.

Literary commitment is also a civil commitment for Anna Toscano, who has published Il calendario non mi segue. Goliarda Sapienza (Electa, 2023, pp. 96, euro 12). The book's title derives from the posthumous publication of most of her works, which were not printed in their time, as they already belonged to the next generation. Moreover, Sapienza anticipated contemporary definitions, dealing with 'feminism' and 'queer' when they were not yet permissible. Toscano, who rightly considers The Art of Joy (1994) a masterpiece of Italian literature, has also given voice to the protagonist Modesta, who, in a creative reversal, rigorously narrates in the first person the author who conceived her. Modesta transforms the negative experiences of everyday life, taken for granted by the hand that guided her, into stimuli for not allowing herself to be overwhelmed by the vanity of society: 'I have never fallen into the trap of wanting to be someone, but only of wanting to do what makes me feel good,' she noted in a notebook. Sapienza did not follow stylistic fashions or pre-established lines of thought, but connected different, sometimes even opposing contexts with a straightforward and innovative form.