Italy

My first impression of this 1994 Italian novel was that the translator must have gotten quite a workout, with, for example, a character described as exhibiting “childish mischievousness…elusive, playful provocation” and the setting called “contaminated, ruined, corrupted, infested, dirty.” Next came the confusion over the story’s era. It takes time to grasp that we’re visiting the 1980s in Sicily, which is one part of what makes the book so rich; the island is an anachronism. The Sicilian words sprinkled throughout also seem fermented relics of a bygone time; words like scassapagghiara, thugs, and spasciamarroni, guttermouth. Growing from this arid dystopia is a masculidda, or tomboy, called Tina (she creates this nickname for Cettina because it’s “short, hard, a bit foreign”). Time is again confused here, with Tina acting both much older than her teenage years, such as when she takes over a band of boy mafia trainees, and much younger, in her obsession with impressing grownups so that she can become “respected,” i.e., a mafia member. The narrator, who’s writing a book about Tina, leads us to the Bronx, as Tina’s run-down neighborhood is called by locals. Our protagonist is strangely absent from the town and readers aren’t sure until the end if she’s on the run, in prison, or maybe dead. Through the book we get a look at the notorious, shocking life of the girl who defied her father’s saying that “A night [is] wasted when you make a girl” to satisfy violent ambitions. Well worth the read, especially for those who enjoy stories of women smashing barriers.