House on Moon Lake     by Francesca Duranti, Translated by Stephen Sartarelli Original title: La casa sul lago della luna Original language: Italian Published by Delphinium Books, Incorporated Format: Paperback, 181 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.61 x 8.24 x 5.29 ISBN: 1883285208 Edition: 1st Edition List Price: $13.00, £8.87 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.87 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.40 Published by Random House, Incorporated Pub. Date: 1986 Format: Hardcover, 192 pages ISBN: 0394550374 Edition: 1st Edition List Price: $15.95, £10.14 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £10.14 Published by Collins Harvil Pub. Date: 1987 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover List Price: £9.95 Not available for ordering Published by Collins Harvil Pub. Date: 1987 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 189 pages Not available for ordering Published by Flamingo Pub. Date: 1988 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 181 pages List Price: £4.99 Not available for ordering

Click on image to see enlargement

This is the story of a rare specimen: a male with a complicated, neurotic, ‘feminine’ character, who is both attracted to and repulsed by his strong and sensible modern girlfriend. There’s a good amount of role reversal in the feminine but sexually flexible image of possession proffered here: she is the one who ‘possessed him and penetrated him...and she was the one who decided when to leave without saying a word.’


Duranti’s titillating but intelligent look at the femininized condition the male protagonist Fabrizio, a literary translator by profession, slips into and which extends to quasi-occult regions as Fabrizio, at work, feels himself being ‘permeated and possessed by the Other’ — merging with the author he is translating. Perhaps though Duranti is depicting something less than occult: the process a translator lives through when engaged in a long and intensely close relationship with his or her subject. A translator has to understand an author’s every nuance, every heightening, twist or weighting of words and render them into his own language can be carried right up to the boundaries of his personality and to those of another. The theme might produce in a reader far wider reflections than just those that preoccupy translators.


Another major theme of the book, perhaps a very Northern Italian or Middle European one (Northern Italy is also part of Mitteleuropa) is that of inheritance. One could understand from a few lines of The House On Moon Lake more than one could from all those fat family sagas that torment the shelves of W.H.Smith what a lineage might be, what ideals could be extracted from it and how it could be something to preserve or to create or imagine if found to be absent.

‘Fulvia was made of different stuff. Her moral toughness, her loyalty, her sincerity, her faithfulness to bargains, were absolute: there was never any question that she could look after herself and knew what was coming to her. That was her style, the mark of the great, old, noble stock of Adelmo Basso, the cooper; it was something that could not be bought or taught — a system, a universe of objects, laws and memories so ingrained that it entered the blood and became second nature: a legacy, the only possession one could avail oneself of with genuine confidence...a cornerstone on which to build subsequent constructions, a solid base to rest on or to take off from, a standard for relations with others and a model for solitude...’ p80