Aracoeli

(Paperback)

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Description

An aging man attempts to recover the past and get his life back on track in the process. His deceased mother, Aracoeli, came from a small Spanish town and married an upper class Italian navy ensign. The idyllic years she spends with her only son, Mauel, are shattered when she contracts an incurable disease and becomes a nymphomaniac. Now 43, Manuel is a unattractive, self loathing, recovering drug addict who works in a dead end job at a small publishing house. He decides to travel back to Spain to search for traces of his mother.

Reviews

"...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 Morantes 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

Author Bio

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 Mdicis tranger 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.