The Age of Discontent

I picked up the Italian version of this book (L'Eta del Malessere) while on vacation in Paris last March. I still remember from my Italian text book in college that one of the characters in the "dialoghi lampi" portions was reading the latest book by Dacia Maraini and adored everything she had written. Wow, I thought, to end up in a text book destined for a foreign market, this writer had to be the human equivalent of champagne. I only recently discovered that Maraini was for over twenty years the live-in companion of Alberto Moravia, another glum Italian author who I favor. But all this has little to do with the book. The Age of Discontent is a very elegant, compact story of a young woman grappling with constrictive circumstances show more (parents, love, class, etc.) and eventually achieving release (of a sort) at the end. Enrica starts as a passive, somewhat self-destructive teenager, unconsciously responding to her mother's obession with wealth and status. Over the course of her last school year, she discovers the infructuousness of looking to others, men in particular but also women, to safeguard her own livelihood and happiness. show less

Another little gem of what I call Italian neo-realism (not sure if there's a preferred literary term for this style/genre, so I just use the cinematographic term). There's no plot, but there's a story. The story is simple, but contains multitudes. The characters aren't wacky, but real, true.
Here we see a girl with an "arid heart" (as in Cassola's novel), perhaps a confused heart, a lost soul, but we grow up, time passes, one age (età) of malaise (malessere) passes into another age of... well, that would be another novel....

The main protagonist, seventeen year old Enrica, goes through the motions of a struggling life made by an absent, inept father, an embittered mother, a careless, selfish lover and a sub par educational system.

There are parts that hit like a punch in the stomach, especially the depiction of poverty in the struggling household where all three share the same, unique towel (which is in fact a tablecloth) and money simply isn't enough, though not with the same desperate intensity of [b:Il maestro di Vigevano|16009442|Il maestro di Vigevano|Lucio Mastronardi|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1347716294s/16009442.jpg|21776160]. But there is something almost excessive in Enrica's apathy, which leads her to not "just" be almost too casual with show more her sexual encoutners, but also to prostitute herself by chance. She gets pregnant (by her steady boyfriend, who is about to marry so as to be able to give up college to work for his future wife's father, though it could be any's of her other two partners) and gets an abortion.

It did not work for me - after Moravia's [b:The Time of Indifference|67145|The Time of Indifference|Alberto Moravia|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1347231801s/67145.jpg|1883062], this did not strike a chord. show less

Die junge Enrica lässt sich treiben: Sie trifft sich mit Cesare, wenn der sich von Examen und Braut lösen kann, versucht Carlo loszuwerden, der ihr auf Schritt und Tritt folgt und den sie nicht will und flieht ihren Vater, der in den römischen Vorstadtkneipen das knappe Geld vertrinkt...Doch sie fängt an zu ahnen, dass sie einen Beruf, eine Arbeit braucht, um wirklich selbstständig zu werden.
Kühl und genau entwickelt Dacia Maraini die Geschichte einer Frau, die auf dem Weg ist, ihr Leben selbst in die Hand zu nehmen.
Dacia Maraini, 1936 in Florenz geboren und bis 1946 in Japan aufgwachsen, lebte danach erst in Palermo, jetzt in Rom. Nach journalistischen Anfängen erschien 1962 ihr erster Roman, und bereits 1963 "Zeit des show more Unbehagens" als zweiter. Für ihn erhielt sie den 'Prix Formentor'. Bis heute zieht sich das Thema Emanzipation beinahe leitmotivisch durch ihr Werk. show less