THE HUNGER OF WOMEN, do not read if you're hungry and have no food available...that way madness lies

THE HUNGER OF WOMEN
MAROSIA CASTALDI (tr. Jamie Richards)
And Other Stories
$14.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

Winner of the 2023 National Translation Award in Prose!

The Publisher Says: Rosa, midway through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself—by opening a restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to collaboration to emotional and physical love.

Unconventional in style and yet rivetingly accessible, The Hunger of Women is a novel infused with the pleasures of the body and the little shocks of daily life. Made up of Rosa’s observations, reflections, and recipes, it tracks her mental journey back to reconnect with her own embattled mother’s age-old wisdom, forward to her daughter’s inconceivable future, and laterally to the world of Rosa's new community of lovers and customers. A tribute not only to the tradition of women's writing on hearth and home but to the legacy of such boundary-breaking feminist writers as Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Helene Cixous, The Hunger of Women is nothing less than a literary feast.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A chest-pokey second-person punctuationless stream-of-consciousness narrative of a woman's awakening to the body's hungers? Where she addresses me directly as "Reader" throughout?! Four stars?!

I have not been kidnapped, am not being threatened with grievous bodily harm, and have not lost (more of) my mind. This is a work that, like Ducks, Newburyport and Milkman, uses what could feel like a gimmick in less talented hands to drag you willy-nilly into the head of a woman who, in middle life, determines she is not living, but existing, so sets out to use her woman-ness to its fullest capacity. She's Neapolitan, living in Milan, the mother of an adult daughter whose life has (as they must) diverged from her mother's despite their living together. Her marriage ended when her husband was killed in a car accident...very believable for anyone who's driven in Italy...so there's a huge space in her life as yet unfilled.

So you know, US readers: Neapolitans are the Southern Black folk of Italy, and Milan is the mothership of Italian racism and fascism. AND Rosa's a woman in a misogynist society. These are facts that color the way one sees the narrator that might not be obvious.

Rosa addressing us as "Reader" is my least-favorite thing in this largely plotless inner journey of an adult into the selfhood denied for so long simply by doing the rote, expected things. Rosa decides to open a restaurant...she knows about food, so it makes sense...and thus opens the floodgates of her body's hunger for womanly touch. This is pretty much it as to plot.

A lot of the prose, then, is dedicated to telling us the story of a woman's world as circumscribed by her agreement to be repressed. As that agreement wanes, and as she regales us with...recipes is not the word, with ingredients and techniques for making them sing together, much as one does when talking to a friend who shares one's experience level and cultural referents. These are poetic prose evocations of the cuisine of Naples in all its seafoody glory.

I wanted it all. All the time I read the book I was FAMISHED for the flavors she so intensely evokes in her passages of passata and disfruitings of frutti di mare (seaborne creatures). Then to trudge upstairs to gob a blob of kosher "food"...well, it was its own special torture.

I think I might've withheld a fifth star simply out of enraged anguish....

Is this a read for everyone...well, honestly not. The narrative has no drive for the plot-driven reader. The story is richer with some background that many simply won't care to acquire. The narrator's food-driven hunger is not going to do good things to dieters' willpower. People experiencing sexual deprivation or skin-hunger are not going to feel soothed. I don't imagine the eww-ick homophobes will have too much to shudder over unless they're insanely sensitive to sensuality shared by others. Those sorts aren't likely to be reading my stuff, fortunately.

So I'll clutch my fifth star to my deprived-of-cuisine chest but urge most of y'all to get the beautiful, poetic, seamless translation of a vibrant, intense woman's coming alive for your pre-Thanksgiving (US) or pre-Yule pleasure.

The feast before the feast, let's call it.