Aracoeli (Open Letter Modern Classics)

Product Description

“The first time I read Aracoeli, I found it almost pointlessly disturbing and shocking. On rereading it, I still found it disturbing and shocking, but I have also grown to admire it―perhaps because it is so dark and resists any attempt to classify it. In writing this novel, Morante may have knowingly sacrificed clarity and logic in order to express her vision of a chaotic world.” (Lily Tuck, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante)
Aracoeli―Elsa Morante’s final novel―is the story of an aging man’s attempt to recover the past and get his life on track in the process. The Aracoeli of the title is the narrator’s deceased mother, who grew up in a small Spanish town before marrying an upper-class Italian navy ensign. The idyllic years she spends with her only son―Manuel, the narrator of the novel―are shattered when she contracts an incurable disease (probably syphilis) and becomes a nymphomaniac.
Now, at the age of 43, Manuel, an unattractive, self-loathing, recovering drug addict who works a dead-end job at a small publishing house, decides to travel to her hometown in Spain in order to look for her. Filled with dreams and remembrances the novel creates a Sebaldian landscape of memory out of this painful journey, painting a portrait that is both touching and bleak.
Appearing here for the first time in paperback―the hardcover was published in 1984―Aracoeli is an important, and long-neglected, work in Morante’s oeuvre.

Review

“…Aracoeli certainly deserves to be recognized as a great work of existential literature, alongside Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurid’s Brigge. … Morante writes gorgeously of the disintegration and destruction of the body and mind. Although the path she takes is dark, the unraveling is ecstatic.”―Kate Zambreno, Believer
“The bond between a mother and son is like no other. “Aracoeli” is the story of Manuel, a man who seems to have nothing to live for. In his mid-life crisis, he returns to his mother’s hometown to try to piece together her life to gain some semblance of closure about a bond that was lost. Hoping to get his own life back on track by understanding his mother’s, “Aracoeli” is deftly translated from the original Italian by William Weaver, an excellent read for those seeking world fiction.”―The Midwest Book Review
“A Storyteller who spellbinds.”―New Yorker Review of Books
“There is a peculiar Dostoyevskian visionary quality in Morante’s writing that occasionally illuminates her somber Naturalistic landscape. At a number of crucial junctures she manages to carry out wonderful forays into the uncanny, moving from bleak earthbound things to metaphysical vistas.”―New York Times
“A marvel of a novel. . . . All the pleasures that fiction can offer.”―Saturday Review
“Stately, baleful, agonized, and powerfully single-voiced.”―Kirkus Review

About the Author

Elsa Morante was an Italian novelist, short story writer, and poet who was married to Alberto Moravia. Although most well known for History, she actually received the Premio Strega for Arturo’s Island in 1957 and the Prix Médicis étranger in 1985 for Aracoeli.
William Weaver was one of the preeminent translators of Italian literature. He translated works by Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Italo Svevo, Primo Levi, and many other great Italian writers of the twentieth century. He was awarded the National Book Award for Translation in 1969.