Lucy Beker
The latest book by Italian writer Elsa Morante, Aracoeli, is available for the first time in Dutch, 43 years after its publication. This is interesting, because Elsa Morante is one of the most famous Italian writers of the twentieth century and received numerous literary awards during her lifetime. At the same time, it is a book from 1982, now published under its Dutch title. My Andalusian mother, and to me it seems a bit dated.
It actually takes some perseverance to finish this book. This is primarily due to the archaic writing style, with long, complex sentences, difficult words, and frequent, often laborious comparisons. Secondly, it takes quite a while for the first-person narrator to tell the real story about his Spanish mother.
From the lengthy introduction, the reader can surmise that things aren't going well for this protagonist. He's depressed and struggling with a childhood trauma related to his mother's untimely death. Manuel was still a child when she died, and he clearly hasn't been able to process that loss.
At the beginning of the novel, he – now in his forties – travels to southern Spain, to his mother's birth village, in an attempt to reconstruct the life of his mother, who died young.
During that trip to Spain we read about, among other things, apocryphal memories and about it morganatic marriage of his Italian father. Not everyday terms, but as a reader, you can still deduce from the context what it's about. Because Manuel remembers being at his mother's breast as a baby: something we don't normally remember. And Manuel has gathered from the attitude of his aunt and paternal grandparents that his father had married Aracoeli beneath his station.
In the first half of the book, his memories are often interspersed with descriptions of depressing evenings and oppressive dreams. There are plenty of hints that things aren't going well for his Andalusian mother in Italy, but it's only in the second half that the story really takes off.
Then we read how the young, cheerful Spanish girl ends up in Rome and how she spends her early years there with her young son Manuelino, whom she adores. But when he's about six years old, everything changes.
Quite a lot is happening in her life, and as a young boy, Manuel can't understand it all. Now that he looks back like this, we, the readers, do begin to understand what happened and what a traumatic childhood he had. Whether the journey is healing for him, we never know.
For us, it ultimately becomes a beautiful story, although the writing style is actually outdated. Or at least, it won't appeal to everyone. Few will be captivated by sentences like this one on page 288: That last summer now strikes me as a pestilence: where the obsessive series of phenomena, now that I bring it up, is compressed into a teeming concrement adorned with a few isolated scenes, which in themselves represent the complete series.
Anyone who is excited by such an artificial sentence should definitely read this book, because there is much to enjoy.
Elsa Morante (1912-1985) is a monument in post-war Italian literature. She is the great example for authors such as Elena Ferrante and Silvia Avallone - and rightly so, because her work is still as relevant and sparkling as when it was first published. After the success of Arthur's Island, which was received with great praise by the press and readers, the very first Dutch translation of Lies and sorcery from 1948 and now My Andalusian mother. Source: World Library Publishers
My Andalusian mother (original title: Aracoeli), 1982
by: Elsa Morante, translated by: Manon Smits
400 pages
€29,99 (also available as an e-book for €14,99)
World Library, November 2025
ISBN 9789028450929
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