Fifth meeting of the seventh edition of the Reading Group "The Garden"
"The Daughter of the Sun" by Nadia Fusini.
Reading and commentary by Teresa Paladin
The work:
Francis and Zoe, inspired in name by Salinger's characters, are brother and sister, different in character but bound by deep affection and complicity. Francis is a lonely and reflective young writer; Zoe is a woman in her prime, an interpreter by profession, fascinated by esoteric doctrines, always traveling. Francis has a plan: to write a story about Katherine Mansfield, whom Zoe, despite her many readings, does not know. A hint of the writer's life and loves is enough to trigger Zoe's curiosity and spark a dense dialogue between the two in the suspended, timeless stillness of a large garden. The brother thus takes to telling his sister about Katherine Mansfield's restless and extraordinary existence. Born in 1888 in New Zealand, KM, as she liked to sign herself, moved to London in her twenties, and here, attracted by crazy loves and possessed by the perennial feeling of being "at the antipodes," she lives a free and adventurous life, which very soon generates pages of equally feverish writing, shot through with an energy, luminosity and grace that will make them beloved by readers, to this day.
Author:
Nadia Fusini was born in Orbetello in 1946. She has taught English literature at the University of Bari, at La Sapienza in Rome, at the Scuola Normale in Pisa and at the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane (SUM) in Florence. In addition to a vast non-fiction production, and fundamental translations, from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf, he has written a number of highly successful novels: The Mouth Most of All I Liked (1996) Twice the Same Caress (1997), The Vile Love (1999), Elizabeth's Mirror (2002), Necessary Love (2008), Hannah and the Others (2013), Living in the Storm (2016), Mary (2019), and Masters of Love, Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona and the Others (2021). Daughter of the Sun was published in 2012.
Texts and event by The Garden Social Center