THE HUNGER OF WOMEN

A middle-aged widow in a small town starts her own restaurant and a scandalous love affair in this novel by the late Italian author and artist Castaldi.

Rosa learned to cook from her mother, who learned to cook from hers, “in the kitchen that was her life’s prison and salvation.” For these Italian women, food occupies a complicated place: “Only by passing down her love for making food that her mother had passed down to her did she find a crumb of eternity on this earth.” In stream-of-consciousness prose free of most punctuation, Castaldi evokes a woman resisting societal expectations, embracing her lesbianism, and practicing the domestic art of cooking. Of food Rosa says, “First it was something divine simple and natural and later became something controlled regimented and overwhelming But food conserves the nature of the ages and the wisdom of God.” Castaldi has an incantatory, experimental style and a poet’s gift for repetition and imagery. Her gastronomic details are so rich and exuberant they threaten to highjack the narrative, and Rosa’s simultaneous wooing of two local women feels less significant than her recipe for Neapolitan pastiera. A novel about women and their often unseen and unacknowledged manual labor, its strength lies less in plot than in the breadth of its vision and Castaldi’s oneiric evocation of the sensual pleasures—and importance—of food. “Accept my gift—Reader—I have fought my battle in life with food I’ve erected to the heavens cathedrals of pastry and baked longing and pleasure Accept my gift—Reader—I am only a woman I sleep alone Pause with me—Reader—in the suspended time of the eternal present in the land abandoned by God and men under the absolute immobile imploded light of things that exist even without being seen in the sea on the earth in the sky of God in the suspended time of the eternal present in infinite life.”

Unconventional, impassioned, vivid, and delicious, though not, perhaps, to every reader’s taste.