Virginia Asaro's Novel: A Voice for Forgotten Women

I met Virginia Asaro about a month ago at Una Marina di Libri . She arrived in front of the VGS Libri stand, introducing herself. I knew who she was, of course. I knew she had written a novel about Antonietta Portolano , Luigi Pirandello 's wife, and about Francesca Arciola , a figure somehow linked to the events of Antonietta's family. But I had never met her.

A few days ago I picked up Le circonstances frails , bought on that very occasion, “just to take a look at it”. I finished it last night at 2:47, with the clear perception of being in front of a little literary gem , the kind of book I would have liked to publish with my publishing house.

Salinger wrote that the truly unforgettable books are those that, once finished, leave you with an almost childish desire to be able to call the author , as if he were an old friend, to continue talking to him whenever you feel the need. That's how I felt, perhaps driven by the need to prolong the bond with the protagonists of this novel.

The book, published by Navarra Editore , is not the usual immersion in the “lives behind the Genius” , but the story of two women: Francesca, the meek ; Antonietta, the madwoman . It is Antonietta’s broken breath that brushes you in the corridors of Villa Giuseppina. It is Francesca’s light step – and only apparently marginal – a silent but decisive presence in a story that unites and condemns them.

“My whole life has been a succession of circumstances… fragile.”

The quote that opens the novel is a warning. There is no room for hagiography here, but rather for the cracks that support the weight of entire dynasties. It is the story of an obsession , or rather, of several obsessions: that of Antonietta for Francesca, that of the entire Portolano family for money, told with a pace of crime news and the prose of an intimate diary.

Who was Francesca Arciola really? Before Virginia Asaro brought her back to light, she was little more than a shadow on the margins: rarely mentioned in studies on the Portolano family , ignored by most scholars. A governess, say the papers, a presence to be contained, say the whispers of the time. In the novel, however, Francesca not only takes shape: she burns . She is the other half of Antonietta's pain, the current that runs through and fuels the entire story.

Having become pregnant by Calogero Portolano , now a widower and father of Antonietta, Francesca finds herself at the centre of a love opposed by his children, determined to protect the family inheritance.

In 147 lean pages, the author does what scholars have never dared: strips Pirandello of his Nobel Prize-winning cloak and gives voice back to the women who remained behind the scenes.

Antonietta and Francesca, like the forgotten protagonists of a Pirandello novel, are the “excluded” , the repressed. Women linked by the same man , Calogero Portolano , an emblematic figure of a reactionary, authoritarian, patriarchal male power.

And Pirandello? He was no exception. He married Antonietta for economic interest, and revealed himself, over time, to be even more greedy and narcissistic than his father-in-law.

Antonietta will end up locked up in a mental hospital, in an era in which psychiatry was often an armed wing of the patriarchy and electroshock was a method of containment rather than treatment. A fate that, for its cruelty and inhumanity, brings to mind One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest : like the famous figure of Randle McMurphy , Antonietta was also extinguished in body and will by a blind, authoritarian system, incapable of listening to female fragility except as a pathology to be suppressed.

The meaning of this book is fulfilled in the author's final words: " I wanted to write this story so that it would be complete."

A need that is not only literary, but deeply personal: Virginia Asaro is in fact the granddaughter of Virginia , Francesca Arciola's firstborn , and Francesca is therefore her great-grandmother . A figure she has heard about all her life, in family stories. This novel was born from there, from the need to give shape to what had remained in the shadows , to close a circle , to give a voice back to those who have always been left out.

But today, through this book , Antonietta and Francesca return to the limelight . No longer extras, no longer shadows, but finally protagonists.

And one wonders: how many other Francescas and Antoniettas have remained outside of official biographies? How many stories like theirs are still waiting to be written, remembered, redeemed?

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