IL CONDOMINIO DI VIA DELLA NOTTE. AN INVITATION TO MARIA ATTANASIO'S NOVELS

Maria Attanasio is a skilful poet and novelist, that has been writing since the seventies. She has published six books of poems (one translated into Spanish, and two into English) and seven of prose narrative. Her novels are historical, but in the line of novelized history, and they range from the seventeenth century to the present day. Her latest novel, The Building on Night St., moves to a dystopian future that is already part of our present. The protagonists of her books are all "nonaligned", outcasts and rebels; they are all women with one exception (The Forger of Caltagirone). All of them take place in Eastern Sicily and the land of Attanasio's birthplace, Caltagirone. The exception is her latest novel, Il condominio di Via della Notte (The Building on Night St.), set in the imaginary Nordia. Her narrative language is marked diatopically and diachronically: it shows the sign of Sicilian and echoes of the language of the century in which each book is situated