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Finalist for the International Man Booker Prize, winner of the Premio Campiello, short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award upon its first English-language publication in the UK, and published to critical acclaim in fourteen languages, this mesmerizing historical novel by one of Italy's premier women writers is available in the United States for the first time. The Silent Duchess is the story of Marianna Ucrìa, the victim of a mysterious childhood trauma that has left her deaf and mute, trapped in a world of silence. In luminous language that conveys both the keen visual sight and the deep human insight possessed by her remarkable main character, Dacia Maraini captures the splendor and the corruption of Marianna's world and the strength of her unbreakable spirit.… (more)
User reviews
This is the world of Marianna Ucria, youngest daughter of a Sicilian Duke; profoundly deaf and unable to speak, she communicates with her family by writing notes and despite her father telling her that she has been deaf since birth she retains residual memories of hearing sounds. Marianna is introduced at age seven, as she follows her father as he officiates at the execution of a brigand scarcely more than a child himself, to which she has been taken in the hope that the shock may jolt her out of her speechlessness. At age thirteen she is married to her uncle, which as her mother says, 'is a saving of fifteen thousand escudos' over the dowry that a convent would require to take her. The book follows Marianna through key periods of her life, as her children are born, are married and have children of their own. Separated from her society and family by her disability she reads widely and thinks for herself, which serves to set her even further apart.
Recommended to anyone who has enjoyed [The Leopard] although set a hundred years or so earlier [The Last Duchess] is without the same sense of the ending of a way of life.