A VERY COLD WINTER

A fresh translation of Italian novelist Cialente’s novel, originally published in 1964, brings to life a post–World War II Milanese family’s privations, interactions, and encounters.

The antifascist Gruppo ’63 writers, including Cialente’s fellow feminists Alba de Céspedes and Natalia Ginzburg, sought to shake up their nation’s cobwebbed literary conventions and bring a new perspective on Italy’s 20th-century reality. This novel takes place during the frigid European season in 1946-47, when people sought shelter in drafty urban attics rather than die of exposure on their farms. Camilla and her children, Alba, Lalla, and Guido, huddle along with a number of other kinfolk in such an attic, subsisting on meager provisions and whatever treats privileged relatives offer. From the timely yet still-sad death of Camilla’s mother to scenes of new mother Regina and her infant, Nicoletta (whose father, Nicola, we learn, was a Resistance fighter who died after the war), to Alba’s sudden disappearance, Cialente builds a layered pastiche of contrasts: Death and birth, sunny memories against gloomy present, simplicity next to sophistication, and always public versus private. “Everyone’s unhappiness was so depressing, their eternal discontent!,” thinks Camilla. No one has enough room or warmth or silence, making gifts of those things almost as precious as scant opportunities to celebrate, as the assembled do when Regina and neighbor Enzo pair off quietly. Their life together, like everyone else’s, appears in short sections that allow the author to play with narrative distance the way Camilla’s musician nephew Arrigo performs on his violin. In three parts, the story begins with the assembled family, moves out to Alba’s adventures away from them, and returns again to a group coping with tragedy, disruption, and a changing world. Ultimately, it’s the arrival of spring and thus the passage of time that brings this gem of realistic fiction to its imperfectly human conclusion.

As simple and nourishing as the matriarch’s egg soup, Cialente’s prose shows how women brought Italy out of postwar malaise.