Isolina     by Dacia Maraini, Translated by Siân Williams Original title: Isolina, la donna tagliata a pezzi Original language: Italian Published by Peter Owen Publishers Pub. Date: 1994 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 152 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.70 x 8.78 x 5.66 ISBN: 072060897X List Price: $30.95, £14.99 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide Published by Women's Press Pub. Date: June 1995 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 156 pages ISBN: 0704344262 List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering

At the heart of this book is a murder so atrocious that I had nightmares after reading about it. Dacia Maraini’s powerful and sensitively created investigation shows her widening her scope even further as a writer, employing the cinematic description of The Silent Duchess (her previous bestseller) married to the left-wing and feminist sympathies of earlier novels such as The Train to produce a work of unforgettable impact.


Not a novel, yet unashamed of imaginative speculation, Isolina proceeds in a modernist fashion. It displays the way it has been constructed and the reasons for this. The author casts herself as the narrator in order to discover another woman’s story, and perhaps finish it for her. She becomes a journalist, trying to discover the truth and finding out how hard that is. She takes swipe after swipe at her subject, coming at it from different angles, following tangles of clues, going off at tangents and into dead-ends.


In the end, she circles back to the beginning: a woman has been murdered, brutally hacked into pieces, and her murderer escapes scot-free. But in the re-telling of this outrage, this tragedy, she lets us put together a pretty good idea of whodunit and why. It’s a beautifully reparative book, restoring to the dead woman some dignity and to the dismembered corpse some wholeness. Rather than feeling like a voyeur, the reader becomes a mourner.


In January 1900, a bloody bundle was washed up on the shores of the river Adige in Verona. Inside it were the butchered remains of a young woman. Further bundles provided other parts of her body, including the evidence of her pregnancy. Even later, her head was discovered. The body was identified as that of Isolina Canuti, a young woman living locally, with a reputation for being carefree, generous, pleasure-loving, and, some said, promiscuous. This bad reputation, it turns out, was carefully fostered by key players in the drama, acting as a mask that shielded the perpetrator of her murder.


Maraini’s careful and fascinating re-reading of the contemporary newspapers’ accounts of the trial that ensued shows how easily injustice could be done to a poor working-class girl when powerful institutions such as the army were involved. Isolina’s officer lover protested his innocence of her killing to the last and was believed by nearly everybody.


The book’s thrillerish format kept me eagerly reading, despite shudders, to the end. The past came so close: Dacia Maraini, combing present-day Verona for clues, was able to walk where Isolina walked, to stand in the street outside the building where the grisly murder took place, to touch the walls and bridges and shop doors that Isolina touched. There is something very affecting in these accounts of a real life that ended much too soon. The experiences and words of poor women are so often unrecorded in the history books, popping up only as examples of transgression in the discourses of the legal process. Yet Isolina’s life haunts this book, emerging strongly in the reported anecdotes of her friends. She makes zabaglione for her lover, orders a lace-trimmed bodice from the dressmaker to wear in bed with him, hugs a warming-pan in her lap, confides she doesn’t want an abortion.


All these years later, she is listened to again, heard again. But, at the core of the book, we hear her screams, flinch at the terror and the pain.

‘The cemetery is overflowing with tombstones and flowers. It is hot. The sun has just appeared suddenly from behind white clouds. There are massive tall columns around us. In front of us is a kind of pantheon with the inscription PIUS LACRIMIS. We walk around the gravel paths between ostentatious marble graves covered with flowers. There is much rhetoric amongst the engraved phrases of regret: «sons overwhelmed by the loss of their beloved mother», «sisters longing for their Maria», «husband of the most beloved wife», and so on.

Under glass are yellowed oval portraits of the torsos and heads of women sitting stiffly upright, and men with wild stares. Their dark eyes follow visitors with expressions sometimes ironic, sometimes worried, sometimes ecstatic. There are wrinkled little faces, long beards faded by the damp, children who smile unhappily.’ p46