Anna Maria Ortese, a Great Italian Writer
The Writer Who Redeemed the Honor of Italian Literature Since 1945
Oct 18, 2009
The literary critic Pietro Citati's opinion about The Iguana by Anna Maria Ortese, as being "one of the very few books destined to redeem the honor of Italian literature since the Second World War", is all too insightful. Yet, that such a great body of work as hers is not being read in Italian secondary schools and is too often unknown to Italians, is a sad fact.
Isolated in life, Anna Maria Ortese continues to be surrounded by a disturbing reticence also in death. A few events took place in 2008, ten years after her death, in order to celebrate her memory. And yet it seems that such a belated due act of recognition is not enough: more is needed to give this great writer her due.
Ortese' s Literary Beginnings
Anna Maria Ortese was born in Rome in 1914 but spent most of her childhood and adolescence in Naples, a city she loved with a vehemence that prompted her iper-real account of its people's poverty and degradation in Il Mare non Bagna Napoli (The Bay is not Naples), published in 1953.
In 1936 she had come into contact with the writer Massimo Bontempelli, who helped her publish her first collection of stories Angelici Dolori with the publishing house Bompiani.
Italian Magical Realism
It is because of Bontempelli's Italian formulation of magical realism, that her work was first associated with this literary current, and yet it is a formula that she appropriated in a highly original and personal way, producing such a masterpiece as L'Iguana in 1963, which was published two years later by Vallecchi.
Ortese's Wandering Life and Later Works
Anna Maria Ortese was determined to make a living as a writer and had a nomadic and difficult life, working for different newspapers and moving from place to place all over Italy, in the continual attempt to make ends meet. It was only in 1975 that she finally established her home in Rapallo, a small town near Genoa, with her sister, supported by the law known as Legge Bacchelli, which provided financial help to illustrious Italians who lived in poverty.
1975 was also the year of the publication of Il porto di Toledo, while Il cardillo addolorato and Alonso e i visionari were her latest masterpieces. In English readers can enjoy The Iguana, translated by Henry Martin, and The Lament of the Linnet. She has left more than twenty books, among essays, short-stories and novels.
She was a courageous and independent woman who dared to carve her own space in a society and a literary world that were dominated by men and Fascism. Her work is a milestone in Italian literary history.
Click here for more info about this remarkable woman and writer in English.
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