Tag Archives: Marosia Castaldi
Sewing Toward the Sea: Marosia Castaldi’s “The Hunger of Women” as Écriture Féminine
Rosa takes up the challenge of reinventing (recentering) her writing around women—an act of creation which Cixous might refer to as écriture féminine. And while culinary themes dominate her narrative, with lists of foods and recipes often spanning several pages at a time, Rosa accomplishes this recentering using two other themes: the metaphor of the sea, and a reimagined matrilineal genealogy.
Ritual sites of communion and community: Marosia Castaldi’s “The Hunger of Women,” translated from Italian by Jamie Richards
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.