From the Land of the Moon

From the Land of the Moon (Italian: Mal di Pietre) is a 2006 novella by the Italian writer Milena Agus. It was translated into English in 2010 by Ann Goldstein. Agus asked that the passages of her work that were written in Sardinian dialect be left untouched, a wish that was respected.^[1]

Plot

A young woman recounts her grandmother's past life in Italy beginning in 1943 in the middle of the Second World War when her grandmother had reached her 30s and was still unwed. Considered an old maid by her parents, the grandmother was married off by her parents to a man who had come to the town after his home had been bombed. After making it clear that she was uninterested in having a sexual relationship with him, the grandfather consented to marry her as long as he could continue to frequent brothels. Shortly after the grandfather and grandmother moved to his home in Cagliari. The grandmother eventually began to have sex with her husband in order to save the money he would have spent on brothels, but they were unable to conceive a child due to her painful kidney stones which resulted in several miscarriages.

In 1950 the grandmother's doctor recommended that she go to Civitavecchia for thermal treatments at a well known spa. While there the grandmother met a war veteran with a missing leg who lived in Milan and had a wife and child there. The two bond over their artistic passions, his for music and hers for writing.

In 1951, nine months after going to the thermal baths the grandmother has a son. When he is seven she goes to work as a maid so that he can have piano lessons. Unfortunately the grandmother is unable to be close to her son, who favours his father. He grows up to be a classical pianist and has a daughter. The daughter and grandmother are very close and it is the granddaughter to whom the grandmother finally confides her sexual relationship with the veteran. The grandmother also confides that in 1963 she and her husband and child went on a visit to Milan to see her younger sister. The grandmother went believing that she would run into the veteran and be able to leave with him, instead she found herself overwhelmed by the city and had a miserable time though the rest of the family remember the trip as one of the best of their lives. After the trip to Milan the grandmother resigns herself to life with her husband. Sometime later, when she is an old woman, she dies of kidney failure. The granddaughter comes to believe that her real grandfather is the veteran. After her grandmother's death the granddaughter also learns from her mother that at one point her great-grandparents wanted to institutionalize their daughter as she had been cutting herself and wrote obscene poetry to any attractive man who happened to catch her eye.

The granddaughter becomes engaged to a man and the two begin to renovate the family apartment. While doing so a part of the wall crumbles and a notebook is discovered. The notebook belongs to the grandmother and comes with a letter sent from the veteran. It reveals that the sexually charged relationship between the grandmother and the veteran was entirely fictional and that she sent him her story sometime later to ask what he thought of it. He replied saying that the passages were beautiful and caused him almost to regret that they never did have a sexual relationship though they were very friendly at the spa. Furthermore he encourages the grandmother by telling her that contrary to what her family has told her all these years she is not mad.

Adaptations

In 2014 it was announced that Nicole Garcia would be adapting the film for the screen with Marion Cotillard in the lead role. The film premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.^[2]

Reception

The novella was positively reviewed. The New Yorker called it a "spare, fable-like novella".^[3]

References