The Hunger of Women - by Marosia Castaldi (Paperback)

About the Book

Rosa, midway through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself by opening a restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to collaboration to emotional and physical love.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the ALTA National Translation Award in Prose

A tribute not only to the tradition of women's writing on hearth and home but to the legacy of such boundary-breaking feminist writers as Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Hélène Cixous, The Hunger of Women is nothing less than a literary feast.

Rosa, midway through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself--by opening a restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to collaboration to emotional and physical love.

Unconventional in style and yet rivetingly accessible, The Hunger of Women is a novel infused with the pleasures of the body and the little shocks of daily life. Made up of Rosa's observations, reflections, and recipes, it tracks her mental journey back to reconnect with her own embattled mother's age-old wisdom, forward to her daughter's inconceivable future, and laterally to the world of Rosa's new community of lovers and customers.

Review Quotes

"Exquisitely rendered in a poetic stream-of-consciousness that brims with lush descriptions of Rosa's recipes, Castaldi's novel is an ode to pleasure, culinary and otherwise. Stirring and vulnerable, this is not to be missed." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Rosa is sick with anxiety and abandonment . . . Not uncommon if
you're a widow and have an elusive daughter. To fill the void [Rosa] begins to
cook all sorts of dishes . . . Flavours meant to be handed down from mothers to
daughters and which can be shared only with other women, grandiose in their
fragility. The Neapolitan-Milanese Castaldi does not use punctuation, lets
thought flow unchained, because life flows like water, and the search for one's
identity, always painful, always exhausting, manifests even in our food, the
passions in our mouths and hearts." --Rolling Stone Italy

"Marosia Castaldi's project would seem to be precisely that of
revealing the wealth that resides in a woman's domestic microcosm, and the
wisdom and passions that can be read among the ingredients of her kitchen." --Lorenzo
Licciardi, Roma Cultura

"A hypnotic theatre of cruelty and tenderness in which the protagonist
and narrator Rosa and her friends make vacuum cleaners buzz, exhibit the most
lavish forms of desire, desire each other, and desperately, and above all make
food, the food which is really the nourishment of the book itself, an obsession
formalized here in something like a hundred recipes spread over just under two
hundred pages." --Francesco Durante, Corriere del Mezzogiorno

About the Author

Marosia
Castaldi, born in 1951, was a Neapolitan
writer and artist who spent most of her life in Milan, where she died in 2019.
Her degree, from the University of Naples, was in philosophy, and after moving
to Milan in 1971, she studied art at the Brera Academy. She exhibited work in
galleries across Europe and in the US and taught creative writing seminars at
the Scuola Holden in Turin and Lalineascritta in Naples. Her extraordinary and
experimental literary oeuvre includes the short story collections Abbastanza
prossimo (1986), Casa idiota (1990), Piccoli
paesaggi (1993), the prose collection In mare aperto (2001),
the theatrical text Calco (2008), and the novels Fermata
km 501 (1997), Per quante vite (1999), Che
chiamiamo anima (2002), Dava fine alla tremenda notte (2004), Il
dio dei corpi (2006), and the monumental Dentro le mie mani le
tue. Tetralogia di Nightwater (2007). The Hunger of Women, her
first book to appear in English, was nominated for the Strega Prize in
2012.

Jamie Richards is an
American translator of Italian literature. She has translated books by Viola di
Grado, Roberto Saviano, Igiaba Scego, Ermanno Cavazzoni, Manuele Fior, and
others. A 2021 NEA fellow, her work has appeared in numerous periodicals online
and in print. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of
Iowa and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon.