Content area
Full Text
Luigi Malerba. Itaca per sempre. Milan. Mondadori. 1997. 185 pages. L.27,000. ISBN 88-0442888-0.
There is Ulysses, who, after a ten-year journey, finally sets foot, again, on his native soil. And here is Luigi Malerba, who strives to transform the tail end of the Homeric tale into a full-scale, ingenious interchange-intercourse in the widest sense of the term-between the hero and his wife. By the assimilation, perhaps, of some nondescript dialogic mode a la Bakhtin, Malerba structures his book as a succession of alternating monologues, now by one spouse, now by the other. Thus, Ulysses and Penelope set out, wistfully, to lay bare their souls. More often than not, they succeed in keeping score of ways ever so subtle in which one can give the other a piece of one's mind.
The reader, it is fair to say, soon realizes that Malerba goes far beyond this curious joust of connubial one-upmanship. Itaca per sempre (Ithaca...