Personal travails run parallel or intersect with political turmoil; individual standpoints clash with social constraints and cultural mores; and affairs of the heart play out against Fascist demands of unswerving allegiance to the state. Italy falls, the carnage ends, friends die, but Modesta goes on, a fighter, a mother, later a grandmother, and thankfully for the reader, always an enemy to "the limitations of convention." Anne Milano Appel's expert translation deserves mention, and her illuminating glossary decodes recondite Sicilian slang and contextualizes songs, proverbs, historical figures and the many references to Dante. Out of the bedroom, Modesta has some insightful truths to offer on love, both playful ("we fall in love because over time we get bored with ourselves and we want to enter into someone else") and blunt ("love is neither absolute nor eternal"). In "The Art of Joy," she writes authoritatively and enthrallingly on Italy's moral disintegration and seductively on her beguiling heroine's resistance to social norms and opposition to Il Duce's restrictions. "The Art of Joy" is perhaps too sweeping, too epic - too much of what Henry James termed a loose baggy monster - to usurp Tomasi di Lampudesa's "The Leopard" or the perfectly realized short stories of Giovanni Verga as the best fiction to come out of Sicily.
Reported by SFGate 16 hours ago.
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