Originally published in 1968 as Mio Marito, this collection of 17 short stories offers a compelling, often disturbing vision of the lives of women in urban Italy during the 1960s. Maraini explores, in a spare and ironic style, fundamental feminist issues of gender roles, identity, sexuality, and violence against women. Society's collusion in the oppression of women in working relationships, through the family dynamic, and in sexual relations comes under her intense scrutiny. While many of Maraini's stories are dark and her characters come to a tragic or absurd end, others are wickedly humorous, particularly those in which she treads a fine line between the comic and the absurd.... Vera Golini's translation is true to the spirit of the original.... But Golini offers us much more than a translation: she includes a succinct critical introduction, a detailed afterword on Maraini's life and prose, a number of useful appendixes, and a critical bibliography. Thus, this edition of My Husband will not only appeal to a general reading public, but it will also provide invaluable assistance to scholars and students interested in contemporary and comparative literature, cultural studies, women's studies, and feminism.

Dacia Maraini was born in Florence in 1936. Her father’s profession as an anthropologist and his antifascist stance led the family to emigrate to Japan where, during the war, they were confined for two years in concentration camps. In 1945 the family returned to Sicily and, when her parents separated in 1954, Dacia moved to Rome with her father.
Maraini’s first two novels, La vacanza (The Holiday) and L’età del malessere (The Age of Indifference), published when she was twenty-six and twenty-seven, were instant international successes: the latter received the editors’ international Formentor prize and was instantly translated into twelve languages. In 1990 Maraini sealed her international success with the publication of the novel La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa (The Silent Duchess, Feminist Press, 1992) which stayed on Italy’s bestseller list for almost two years and won the prestigious Premio Campiello (Italy’s equivalent of the us National Book Award). It was published to critical acclaim in fourteen languages.
Several of her books have been made into films, and Maraini has also written screenplays for directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carlo di Palma, and Margarethe Von Trotta. She is a prolific writer with more than fifty publications of novels, poetry, and plays. She lives in Rome, actively promoting theatre groups, playing a very active role in the literary scene, and speaking on tv and in national newspapers and magazines on the evolving economic and social conditions of Italian and European women.
|Vera Golini emigrated with her family to Canada from Abruzzo in 1956. She has been a professor of Italian studies at St. Jerome’s University since 1975, and since 1997 has also directed the Women’s Studies program at the University of Waterloo. She is currently president of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies.

Table of Contents for My Husband by Dacia Maraini with Vera F. Golini, translator

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Translation

Introduction


My Husband

Dazed

Mother and Son

The Wolf and the Lamb

The Two Angelas

The Other Family

Diary of a Telephone Operator

Beloved Death

The Red Notebook

Suffering

The Linen Sheets

Marco

The Blond Wig

Diary of a Married Couple

Plato’s Tree

Maria

These Hands


The Life and Prose Works of Dacia Maraini: An Afterword

Appendixes

Interviews with Dacia Maraini

Bibliography of Maraini’s Writings

Maraini’s Filmography

Awards and Translations of Maraini’s Prose Works

Critical Bibliography of Maraini’s Prose Works