Marosia Castaldi, the author of the 2012 novel The Hunger of Women—translated in 2023 by Jamie Richards for And Other Stories—is barely known in Italy, although, as Richards points out in her translator’s note, her writing was praised by important and well-known contemporary Italian authors like Domenico Starnone. Castaldi was prolific, writing sixteen books from the 1980s through the 2010s; she was also an active member of the Italian artistic, literary, and intellectual scene, but, like many Italian women writers, never reached the level of recognition of some of her male contemporaries.
The Hunger of Women is Castaldi’s first novel to be translated into English, and perhaps this new version of her work will spark interest that radiates back to Italy. As Richards states, it is “a strange and difficult work” (180), stylistically and thematically, but it is also a work that showcases Castaldi’s originality and why she deserves wider readership in both Italy and the English-speaking world.
The novel is narrated from the perspective of a fifty-year-old Neapolitan widow, Rosa, whose daughter’s coming independence and plan to move to France lead to Rosa’s decision to start a restaurant in small-town Lombardy. Rosa’s restaurant becomes a source of orgiastic frenzy for the Lombard villagers, who devour her traditional Neapolitan cooking in a kind of carnal ecstasy. Rosa makes the decision, in this new act of her life, to explore her love and desire for women, previously only experienced with a childhood friend in Naples: she embarks on a seduction of various women in her small town.
The novel takes place in a temporal limbo: what is the timespan for the course of the events? It is unclear, just as it is unclear when exactly the events of the novel take place: references to refrigerators, cars, and vacuum cleaners situate them in the twentieth or twenty-first century, but whether they are unfolding in the 1960s or the 2010s is left unspecified. The disregard with which the novel treats timelines and historical events is connected to its form on a microlevel: the novel does not contain a single period, and other punctuation is used sparingly. As Richards writes in her translator’s note, “If the general purpose of punctuation is clarity and pacing, what happens when we read a text virtually absent of these guideposts?” (180).
Indeed, reading Castaldi’s prose takes some getting used to, and Richards’ translation is a delicate balancing act between adapting the original’s syntax and reflecting its effects in English. Italian allows for longer sentences, “a syntactical flexibility that derives from its more heavily inflected Latin origins, so that lexical units could be said to evoke, spectrally, the case markers they no longer contain” (181), in Richards’ formulation. The translation alternates breaking Italian sentences into shorter segments and challenging the reader with long sentences whose clauses build on one another unpredictably, as in: “An oleograph of youth formed in the yard with the jocular children and industrious farmhands in a sugary pink April landscape behind which I saw the truth of the blood and flesh of an immolated God with all of humanity on the cross of an eternal calvary” (108). Although many a high school English teacher would mark sentences like this one as “run-on sentences,” Richards’ decision to retain sentence length is in keeping with the novel’s interest in accumulation, in lists of the enormous variety of the world: the names of food prepared and/or eaten by Rosa, or the people who have sailed the Mediterranean over the course of millennia, are catalogued and then repeated, as if they were refrains, throughout the novel.
Richards sees these refrains as connected to “ancient myth,” “a timeless unconscious,” “Dionysian ritual practices” that call back to an ancient Mediterranean world (180). The Hunger of Women highlights food as ritual: making it and eating it are compared to the miracle of transubstantiation, whereby food is turned into flesh and blood. Miracle, like ritual, is therefore a daily occurrence: “every day the miracle of the host was repeated by which the materials of water earth trees flowers fruit stone dirt animals food becomes the material of the material of flesh and of human bodies” (133). Sex is also subsumed into this world of ritual as another site of communion: “I put her hands in mine—Reader—it was the miracle of the host repeated in the form of love It was the transubstantiation of bodies the metamorphosis of food in flesh and the transubstantiation of one flesh into another” (118).
Rosa’s almost pagan rereading of the central miracle of Catholic ritual points to a larger undercurrent that runs throughout the novel, that of the world of Italian peasant rituals examined by postwar anthropologists like Ernesto De Martino. According to De Martino and others, peasant rituals often injected pagan elements into Catholicism and served as a way for the marginalized members of Italian society to retain a sense of control over their own lives, which were often shaped by domination and violence. In peasant societies, the ritual—according to De Martino—is a mode of allowing a subject to remain cohesive in the face of traumatic events that might otherwise lead to the subject’s psychic disintegration. In his research, De Martino noted that, within the peasant societies he observed, ritual work often fell to women.
In The Hunger of Women, Rosa articulates women’s rituals as imparting order not only to individuals, but to the larger community: “Her mother had also inherited from her mother the ancient wisdom that every woman conserves in their divided heart as ambivalent creatures half free from chains and torments and half bound to count and order the bones of creation […] Day and night women always order the bones of the soul and of creation of the living and the dead” (43). The dual nature of ritual—which emerged in De Martino’s studies, as well—emerges throughout the novel: ritual order is both necessary and potentially oppressive. The hands that execute the ritual “rape” and “abuse” but, at the same time, they “make near nothing into the everything of human art and handicrafts” (35). As Rosa’s hands carry out the rituals of feeding, eating, and loving, the novel grapples with the potential for both care and violence to coexist within them. Many of its meditations on this ambivalence recur, through the form of the many paragraph-long refrains; Richards retains the passages’ contradictory elements through careful and consistent translations every time these refrains repeat.
Castaldi’s incorporation of love and sexual relationships between women as emerging from a peasant ritual world is striking from the perspective of Italy in 2024, which, on a legislative level, is more invested than ever in defining Italian identity as heteronormative. In one of her most famous speeches, the current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, came out against the prospect of listing two parents of the same gender on a child’s birth certificate. In May 2024, under her government, Italy refused to sign the EU’s Declaration on the continued advancement of the human rights of LGBTIQ persons in Europe. Right-wing political groups in Italy, like Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party or Matteo Salvini’s Lega party, tend to frame queer and trans identities as antithetical to Italian identity. The Hunger of Women, instead, depicts sex between women as ancient, as constitutive a part of Italy’s identity as the food that Rosa describes making. In this respect, at this political juncture, Richards’ subtle translation of this complex novel offers an antidote to restrictive notions of italianità to an English-speaking audience. We can only hope that, as has occurred recently with other Italian writers, increased recognition abroad will allow Castaldi’s work to be rediscovered in Italy, as well.
Castaldi, Marosia. The Hunger of Women. Translated by Jamie Richards. And Other Stories, 2023.
Isabella Livorni is currently a Faculty Fellow (and Assistant Professor, effective 2025) in New York University’s Department of Italian Studies. She is also an educator and translator. She is currently working on a book manuscript about ideas of cultural, racial, and linguistic differences in the work of poet and musician Amelia Rosselli.