Women of the Shadows

From the author of the acclaimed Torregreca comes this evocation of the women of southern Italy--that land below Naples etched in blazing sunlight and bitter black shadows--and the passionate, painful, ribald, heart-rending, heroic existence the land has forced upon them. Ninetta, Peppina, Teresa, Cettina and the others whose stories are the heart of Ann Cornelisen's deeply humane, unflinchingly honest chronicle, emerge from the shadows in their own words, in the author's sift-moving narratives and piercing descriptions, and in her haunting photographs. We meet them as fresh-faced children, follow them through adolescence, see them as mothers struggling through series of pregnancies, and know them as burnt-out grandmothers at forty. In a time when most of their men have been forced to leave for the factories of the industrial North, the women remain behind, working in the fields under the broiling summer sun, enduring hunger and lack of privacy and desperation, sometimes scheming to break free, always keeping life going. The author forces her "raging fear of social myths and the tragic, shambling chaos their manipulation can create," a fear born out of her long, firsthand knowledge of her subject. She writes as a woman who has won the trust of the diffident, cautious women she has lived among in the mountainous villages of Lucania, evolving a rapport that has given her an extraordinary understanding of their interior lives. The result is one of those rare books that, as Paul Bailey wrote in The New Statesman of Torregreca, "makes us proud to belong to the human race." (jacket)