This book follows the lives of three generations of extraordinary characters who occupy a farm in Piedmont, Northern Italy, from the late eighteenth century, when Napoleon’s armies come marching through, to the days when the first factories start to appear outside the local city walls. Its overview of history is interesting in itself, particularly as it reveals that France, rather than Italy (a nation not yet created), was the metropole, the source of ideas, fashions and even songs for these North-Easterners.


One great strength of Loy’s book is that it makes space, as does Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude, for the ‘peculiarness’ of life, for bizarre characters who crop up in family lines. Another is that it undertakes a fertile exposition of what one might call the ‘woman’s’ (rather than the ‘feminist’) ideology in its representation of women protagonists as the strong, real people, of the beauty of children and of the domestic space as the real theatre of life. Battles, coups d’état, politics, even agricultural work all take place off-stage here, important only insofar as they affect women as mothers, wives, matrons and matriarchs. Men, moreover, are generally seen as gorgeous, delicate creatures, stallions with brittle legs and sensitive ears, objects of female desire, hopefully but not often turning into good providers and stewards in later life. Perhaps a woman younger than Loy (presently in her early fifties) couldn’t have written like this, and would have brought to her writing a degree of scepticism about traditional family arrangements...


Be that as it may, Loy’s descriptions of her female characters is truly a wonder, perhaps owing something to the Italian cultural fixation with beauty — from which comes the notion that external appearance reflects the soul, very different from the Protestant, Northern idea, which expects to find inner purity under an exterior plainness. The Italian vision, the Italian celebration of beauty is perhaps the same one that helped make Italians such great painters during the Renaissance.

‘Luis’ first wife was the Maturlins’ Teresina. She was, as everyone would have expected, plump just where plumpness was necessary and she had fiery hair. Not tawny like the smith’s daughter but a barley blonde, intense and thick...The Maturlins’ Teresina played the spinet and she used her table-napkin with such grace that it was a pleasure to watch her eat...Her great passion was the rusnent, the rust apples, which she gathered by herself and ate at all hours, biting deep into them with her strong, little teeth, neatly aligned. She also loved the blossoms of those apples and during the spring she spent in the house she would put them in her hair and at dusk, wilted, they would fall to the ground, a sign of her luminous passage.’ pp108-9