Literature
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Interview with Nathalie Castagné around her biography of the Italian novelist, of which she is also the translator. A publication which is part of a series of tributes to the woman who would have been 100 years old this week.
The Art of Joy is one of those books that leaves a lasting impression on you. The portrait of a free and non-conformist woman who crosses the 20th century and its upheavals with incredible audacity, imagination, sensuality and courage. To read it is to become forever attached to the figure of Modesta, the heroine, and to exhume her at regular intervals from your memories to better understand the present, put it at a distance and overcome the tragedies of everyday life. Especially since Modesta ends up merging with the one who conceived her, the Italian writer Goliarda Sapienza, whose life and death are a novel in themselves, recounted to us by her translator, Nathalie Castagné, in a rich and informative biography. exciting published this month to celebrate the writer’s centenary.
Born into an unconventional Sicilian family very committed to the left (“libertarian socialist” says her biographer), Goliarda Sapienza had several lives, actress, activist, writer. Whatever she did, she lived it all “with greater intensity than normal” reports Nathalie Castagné, happiness as well as misfortune, and she has experienced a lot of both. Thus his depression after Luchino Visconti preferred another actress for an important role in Arthur Miller’s play the Witches of Salem that he had to stage. Or this other depression which followed the screen
