A WOMAN'S LAST NAME
In the beginning there is Rosa. Born in Sicily at the beginning of the century, and raised an orphan in a little village nestled in the mountains, she proves herself worthy of the flower she is named for, a wild rose, resistant and thorny, whose precious fruits bloom in the most hostile of circumstances. In 1925, she meets Sebastiano Quaranta, who had neither father, mother nor sister, meaning that Rosa had found the only man in the world who did not know how to play her. It is a love at first sight that never betrays. Rosa elopes with him and together they open a restaurant which quickly becomes a meeting place for locals, a place to gather and spread news. Its reputation spreads and soon clients are coming from the four surrounding towns. In a short span of time, three children are born: Fernando, Donato, who joins the Church, and Selma, whose hands are as delicate as fine needlepoint at which she will excel. Rosa watched her daughter, so delicate like her father, and thought no, it is not a fine trait for a woman. It is one thing to be kind, to not know evil, if you are a man. That is a good man. But a young woman with the same traits is a dark curse.
gainst her mother s better judgement, Selma allows herself to fall for Santi eraviglia, nicknamed Santi eraviglia the arvelous Santi , for his delicate and virtually translucent skin. The real troubles begin when he becomes the legitimate family head, taking control of a meticulously curated inheritance, and doing with it as he pleases. But the real price of their father s errors is paid by Selma and Santi s daughters: atri ia, the rebel of the three, avinia, as beautiful as irna isi, and arinella, Santi s favorite who grows up in the s and dreams of studying abroad. They are guided by the spirit of Sebastiano Quaranta who visits them in their most difficult moments, even when Santi demands they leave the mountainside to marry in the city.
page turning novel of epic dimension, S ST weaves the drama, for better and for worse, of these five unforgettable lives, and the generations that precede and follow them, in a novel of unforgettable storytelling.
The debut novel of an author of immense talent.
omen are connected by invisible threads. ike a well seamed garment, they are hidden in the folds, within the weave, in the memory of a basting, in the knots beneath a hem, in the mending that keeps it from sight. But upon closer examination, the thread is robust, an inheritance all women share. In this expertly drawn novel, urora Tamigio takes us by the hand to shows us how the stitching is done, where it begins and where it leads.
hat remains of a woman s last name when she marries o one remembers who she was before marriage, but the stories of her mother and her mother s mother before her, and all the women who proceeded are gathered in her story. ithout them, half of her world is missing. To understand who we are, we must know where we came from. Rosa has a rare capacity to make wherever she is home, even in the most hostile of circumstances, and to make space for spirits, to hear them, and to know that they wish to help her defend all that she holds dear. er daughter Selma passes on to her own three daughters loss and regret together with an old Singer sewing machine that will help her create new form and new garments.
atri ia, her eldest daughter, inherits resilience from her mother and grandmother, sharpens her capacity to refute injustice and all that does not serve her. avinia inherits a imagination, knowledge and her grandmother s beauty. nd arinella, the youngest daughter, perceives the anger from per predecessors, but also that freedom that none before her had ever tasted perhaps the two are connected. nd then there are the men around them: steadfast uncles who give them strength, traitors, inseparable friends, and impossible loves. nd lastly, the spirits of ancestors who whisper and remind them of the ethereal separation between the living, the dead and the memory of both.
hat rests of our randmothers of our mothers and of all the omen ho have re eded us
Dear Booksellers,
The first thing I would like to tell you is that this novel is born from my own passion for genealogy. hen I enter anybody s house for the first time, I am immediately drawn to the room or shelf that contains personal photographs or objects: knickknacks, old radios, tea sets and then, at the risk of being impertinent, I ask about their family: was your father in the arines as your reat unt an actress Is that typewriter original nd this is where the stories start: y ncle was a mushroom specialist but he also drank. nce he told his family not to eat the mushrooms they had gathered, but they didn t believe him and they all died r y grandmother lived in Rome with the Fontana sisters, come, let me show you the dress they made for her. Some of these stories are brought to life in S ST . thers come from my own family.
ver since I was young, my mother and my unts used to tell me about my legendary grandmother. irtually nothing tangible remains of her except clear memories and the absolute certainty that her death changed the fates of many around her. These suggestive ideas inspired me to write this novel.
I would be lying if I told you that S ST is the story of my family. It is a hybrid, influenced by novels I have loved Isabel llende, abriel arcia rque , ngeles Caso, Rosetta oy and by my own imagination. s a reader, I wish to be transported into another dimension, beyond reality. s a writer, I have tried to invent a world inspired by the storm of yellow butterflies in One Hundred years of Solitude and by ghosts in The Dust Roads of Monferrato.
S ST my first novel is the story of a family, told through five women characters: a grandmother Rosa, a mother Selma, and three sisters atri ia, avinia and arinella. It takes place over the course of sixty years, in a Sicily of my own invention. I apologi e to Sicilians for any imprecisions and ask that non Sicilians take that into consideration. y Sicily is not so much a place as a domestic atmosphere from my childhood memories: the paranormal stories of the adonie and the corners of alermo which are an unending source of surprise and joy every time I return. owever, this novel is more about time than space.
hat I am most interested in are the themes of female legacy in all facets: economic, transmitted teachings, obsession for involuntary legacy. ike a woman s last name, the female inheritance seems secondary. But similar to the likenesses and physiognomies, it tends to leap generations and manifest itself out of nowhere, perhaps in the color of our eyes or the shape of our nose. It is like an object that travel exceptional distances before appearing on a shelf or in a closet, often surviving the stories of the woman who possessed it.
I hope that you will find a place to rest within my novel. It is not as precious as the old Singer that your grandmother might have treasured, but if you find a bit of family between its pages, I will be happy to have written it.
uroraurora Tamigio was born in alermo in but grew up in ilan fter a degree in contemporary art history she studied screenwriting and worked freelance for film and television Today she works as an agency copywriter in the fields of technology and design She also writes for Silen ioinsala com and contributes to a Balena Bianca Crack Rivista and il Refugio dell Ircocervo
© Adolfo Frediani
La Repubblica: Robinson
Aurora’s Woman, How Stunning They Are
By Stefano MassiniTamigio’s debut novel is entirely original and surprising- far from being just another Sicilian women’s saga.
A basic premise: although you might think that it is anomalous to debut in 2023 with a family novel of three generations though the legacy of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters, it is not.
Tamigio's novel is consciously dense with reverberations of Ginzburg's Lessico Famigliare, or certain echoes of Deledda's Pintor sisters, glimpses of Sicilian glimmers and abominations which Dacia Maraini masterfully expressed in her novel Marianna Ucria, or even Stefania Auci. From these important female precedents, so curiously linked by the urgency of recounting the past through a saga, there is an impertinent levity, almost Sciascia-like.
Therein lies the strength of many of the pages, combined with the radical choice not to focus on a family of well-known merchants or industrialists, but rather on an ordinary family nucleus whose highest triumph is an inn, which draws into its bosom a cast of human beings imbued at the novel's dawning- a kind of archaic animism expressed through a bacchic liturgy of flowers, vegetation, and seasons. Men are comprimarios, candidates for funny nicknames or ectoplasms so that matriarchy as Tamigio interprets it, appears as an emanation of natural cycles. Consequently, the progressive infringement of women's dignity takes on (in the subtext) the gravity of an offense against a higher order of creation…
Herein lies the brilliance of this debut: its being a work of flesh brawls, scuffles, big words, bad blood, and strong hues with daughters blaming their father. And it is with this passionate anachronism that the novel won me over. Besides that, how can we ignore that Tamigio is the same age as Artemisia Gentileschi.
