Threshold - Softcover

Manzini, Gianna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159910315X ISBN 13: 9781599103150

Publisher: Italica Press, Inc., 2016

Synopsis

Gianna Manzini’s "Threshold" ("Sulla soglia") was first published in 1973. It still packs an immediacy of emotion and personal subjectivity unique in experimental fiction. This short novel takes an introspective look at a daughter’s relationship to her mother’s last days. We follow the first-person narrator on a trip not quite like others from a train station not quite of this world. "Threshold" captures the conflicting emotions and the closeness of loved ones through the intimacy of material objects. By highlighting the power of materiality, Manzini develops a storyline that frames her reflections on the relationship between parent and child. Manzini skillfully constructs a virtual reality through a language that leads her readers to imagine other possibilities. The dreamlike quality of her writing moves the reader across the border of the real to the imagined and back again. The novel’s evocative and slippery use of symbolism self-consciously confuses temporality and the blurry boundaries between space and perspective. Threshold joins "Game Plan of a Novel" (2008) and "Full-Length Portrait" (2011), two other novels by this highly original Italian writer published by Italica Press. “With this astutely presented and translated novella, "Threshold," Laura E. Ruberto and Irena Stanic Rasin give readers a rare opportunity to experience Gianna Manzini’s art of storytelling, among Italy’s finest. The first lines sweep us into a suspenseful journey on the verge of life beyond life, amidst sights, sounds, and sensations as traces of meanings for understanding the mysteries of love, disease, the power of memory and writing, and death.” — Robin Pickering-Iazzi, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Preface, Introduction, Note on the Translation, Select Bibliography. 106 pages.

About this title

About the Author:

Gianna Manzini was born in Pistoia, on March 24, 1896. She was the daughter of Leonilda Mazzoncini and of Giuseppe Manzini, whose anarchist politics conflicted with the highly bourgeois values of his wife’s family. The couple separated after her father’s continued bouts with the authorities resulted in his exile in 1921 to nearby Cutigliano where he was finally attacked by fascists and died of a heart attack in 1925. Manzini and her mother moved in with her family in Pistoia until 1916 when they relocated to Florence. There Manzoni finished secondary school and went on to the university, where she prepared for a teaching career. She taught school for only a few months, however, before the first chapter of her novel "Tempo inamorato" appeared in the Florentine newspaper, "La Nazione," in 1924. Eugenio Montale praised the novel, fully published in 1928, for its “intelligence” and “rare sensitivity.” With her short-story "Passeggiata," published in 1929, she began her collaboration with the periodical "Solaria," whose mission was to bring to Italian readers the groundbreaking work of writers like Marcel Proust, André Gide, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. The journal challenged a classical canon that privileged the tradition of Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi. In 1930 Manzini married Bruno Fallaci, the literary critic of "La Nazione," but that marriage soon ended, and Fallaci moved to Milan in 1933 to write for "Corriere della sera." Around that time Manzini met Enrico Falqui, a literary critic and editor of "Poesie." The new couple moved to Rome. There she edited "Prosa" from 1945 to 1946 and continued publishing her work in such literary journals as "Campo di Marte," "Letteratura," "Oggi," "La Fiera Letteraria," "Milano-Sera," and "Gazzetta del Popolo." Manzini turned increasingly to writing novels, winning the Premio Costume (1945) for her "Lettera all’editore" ("Game Plan for a Novel"), the Premio Soroptimist (1953) for "Valtzer del diavolo," the Viareggio Prize (1956) for "La Sparviera," the Premio Marzotto (1961) for "Un’altra cosa," the Premio Napoli (1968) for "Allegro con disperazione," and the Premio Campiello (1971) for "Ritratto in piedi" ("Full-Length Portrait"). "Sulla soglia" ("Threshold") was published in 1973. Always publicly oblique about her personal life, she revealed many of its most intimate details through her writing. Manzini died in Rome on August 31, 1974.

About this edition

• Publisher: Italica Press, Inc.
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 159910315X
• ISBN 13: 9781599103150
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 108