Our next reading circle will have a novel from Italian literature as its theme and will take place on Thursday December 6th at 6.30pm at the Italian Cultural Institute in Montreal.
It will be a nice opportunity to socialize and discuss “Una minima infelicità”, a novel by Carmen Verde. The reading circle will be moderated in Italian by Marinella Catagni, a passionate reader and teacher of Italian language and literature in high schools.
The club is open to everyone, language course students, reading lovers, Italians resident or passing through Montreal.
Some copies of the book are available in the Institute.
Confirm your presence by December 4th and don’t miss the opportunity to discover and engage with a beautiful text of contemporary Italian literature.
Una Minima Infelicità is a dizzying novel. A ship in a bottle that you can’t stop admiring. Annetta talks about her life lived in the shadow of her mother, Sofia Vivier. Beautiful, restless, elegant, Sofia is ashamed of her daughter’s body because it is scandalously small. A petite who doesn’t grow, who remains tall like a child. Locked in the sanctuary of her house, Annetta escapes the rudeness of the outside world, compared to which she feels inadequate. Unbeknownst to her, however, her decline works in secret. It is the arrival of Clara Bigi, a cruel maid, capable of imposing rigid and senseless rules on her, that introduces the first element of discontinuity into family life. Her father, Antonio Baldini, a rich fabric merchant, gives that woman control of her domestic life. Clara Bigi thus becomes Annetta’s guardian, even supervising her readings. The sudden death of her father is the abrupt arrival into adulthood for Annetta. She forgets about herself, she decides to direct her care only to her mother, to the point of taking care of her faded beauty. Trained by her own body to renounce her, she obstinately cultivates her instinct to diminish.
Carmen Verde is an Italian author. Born in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, in the province of Caserta, her stories have been published by Nottetempo, Babbomorto Editore, Cadillac and Succedeoggi, and Tapirulan (Sjette). In 2018 she was highlighted as an author by the Calvino Prize. In 2022 you published Una Minima Infelicità for Neripozza, a book nominated for the 2023 Strega Prize.
Reservation no longer available