A Very Cold Winter - by Fausta Cialente (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Cause for celebration."--Jhumpa Lahiri

A novel of secrets and female solidarity set in post-war Milan, by one of Italy's most significant women writers.

Fausta Cialente (1898-1994) was a novelist, journalist, political activist, and one of the first self-declared feminist Italian writers. Though the fascists censored her early work, she continued as an active member in the anti-fascist movement while living abroad in Egypt, writing pamphlets and making daily broadcasts from Radio Cairo against the Italian regime. She returned home after the war and eventually began publishing again, winning Italy's most important literary award, the Strega Prize, in 1976.

In A Very Cold Winter, it is 1946 and Milan is in ruins. A woman named Camilla opens her illegally occupied attic to her extended family as they rebuild their lives among the rubble. The absence of men--lost to war, death, or abandonment--leaves the burden of survival to the women, who use the attic to incubate fragile futures: Camilla works to carry the family toward dignity and normalcy; Lalla dreams of becoming a novelist to escape their grim reality; Regina, widowed by the war, pins her hopes on her infant daughter; Alba chases independence and love. Varying political ideologies, loyalties, and wartime secrets filter through the house, creating a thick net of tension. As the narrative roams from the thoughts of character to character, the residents of this "hotel for the poor" consider their own complicity and moral compromises, wondering if they're able to escape the weight of what they've lived through.

Fausta Cialente's exquisite prose captures the frailty of the human heart in its desperate search for connection. An introduction from author and Italian translator Claudia Durastanti frames this classic feminist icon for the modern American reader. Tender, thought-provoking, and devastatingly beautiful, A Very Cold Winter is about the impossibility of forgetting the past and the difficulty of living with it.

Review Quotes

"Cialente was a pioneering feminist, anti-fascist writer with a profound literary sensibility. In this crucial account of post-war Italy, her rootless authorial perspective sheds unique light on individual, collective, and national trauma, and speaks to ever-relevant questions about what it means to be a woman, a foreigner, and a survivor. Julia Nelsen's engrossing English translation is cause for celebration."--Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Namesake

"The first of the undersung Fausta Cialente's books to appear in English... A Very Cold Winter contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war."--The New Yorker

"Stellar... rich, enthralling historical fiction. World War II is a perennial venue for historical fiction, its immediate aftermath far less so. Which makes Cialente's A Very Cold Winter all the more welcome."--The New York Times

"In this overdue translation of Cialente's vital 1966 novel, a family struggles to find harmony while crammed together in a frigid Milan squat... The result is an exquisite chronicle of frozen hearts and their gradual thaw."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Uncertain and subtle, like life."--Sally Olds, The Believer

"A Very Cold Winter establishes Cialente's impronta on the postwar Italian women's novel by placing men at the periphery... Here, womanly ambition and desire take on a new manifestation of independence that coexists with domestic forms of patriarchal control."--Los Angeles Review of Books

"Entrancing... Rich with sensual observations and insights."--Foreword Reviews

"Cialente builds a layered pastiche of contrasts: Death and birth, sunny memories against gloomy present, simplicity next to sophistication, and always public versus private... [A] gem."--Kirkus Reviews

"[A Very Cold Winter] offers a stark and uncompromising portrait of debasement in post-war Milan, a city scarred by misery, social erosion, and loss... Cialente contends that the labor of self-determination is the essential prerequisite for restoring a conscience that is at once personal and shared--the prelude to a collective awakening that, to this day, is yet to come."--Asymptote

"Cialente's style as rendered by Nelsen has a centrifugal quality... [she] valorizes everyday life as a site of struggle, too, a place just as world-historical and worthy of our attention as war or political history."--Kaelie Giffel, Full Stop

"A feat of incredible translation. The lesson of A Very Cold Winter is that life will transcend its cycles: those who wait for spring will be disappointed to find the world too changed for its return. This novel paces the poles between anger and frustration that we all know, attempting to find a place of peace."--Annelie Hyatt, Accent Accent Magazine

"Moments of genuine beauty and grace lace this novel as the family navigates the travails and deprivations of post-war Italy."--Toby Cox, Three Lives & Co. (New York City)

"A somewhat frequent thought I have when reading fiction in translation is 'how was this not translated to English already?' and Fausta Cialente's A Very Cold Winter is the epitome of that expression. I was instantly swept up in her luxurious prose, playful but particular. Camilla is a classic 20th-century feminist heroine in Italian literature." -- Charlie Jones, A Room of One's Own Bookstore (Madison, WI)

About the Author

Author, journalist, and translator Fausta Cialente was one of the first self-declared feminist Italian writers. Her early work anticipated modern feminism by decades, however, distribution was limited by the Fascist censorship that followed her refusal to cut depictions of a lesbian affair from her first book Natalia (1931). Contributing to the anti-Fascist movement through her journalism from Egypt, Cialente returned home after the war, and after a long silence, she began publishing again in 1961, eventually winning the prestigious Strega Prize in 1976. With her expatriation that can be interpreted as an influence on the statelessness of her work, Cialente remained far from literary circles and wrote only when she had the urge. Perhaps due to these factors and the initial censorship, her critical recognition came late, and consequently, there has been limited international exposure to this exceptional Italian writer. Cialente spent the last period of her life in Pangbourne, England, working mainly on translations into Italian from English, including Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and she remained there until her death in 1994 at the age of ninety-six.

Julia Nelsen translates between English and Italian. A San Francisco native, she holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and a masters in European languages from the University of Milan, where she studied on a multiyear fellowship from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her work has appeared in Circumference, Two Lines, Chicago Review, Firmament, and elsewhere. A Very Cold Winter is her first full-length translation.

Claudia Durastanti is an Italian writer, translator, and cultural critic. Strangers I Know was shortlisted for the Strega Prize and translated into 21 languages. Her forthcoming novel Missitalia will be published by Summit in the U.S. and Fitzcarraldo in the UK. Her work has appeared in Granta, Apartamento, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She's the curator of the feminist imprint La Tartaruga.