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Voices From a Time

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Silvia Bonucci is best recognized in Italy as being the most credited member of the "girotondi per la liberta'" anti-Berlusconi movement as well as being a translator of French titles. Voices From a Time is her first work of fiction. She was awarded the Zerilli-Marimo'in 2006. The Zerilli-Marimò Prize for Italian Fiction is awarded every two years to a new Italian work of fiction deemed especially worthy of the attention of readers in North America and the English-speaking world.
It treats of the Levi family's brush with fascism, life in Trieste folowing the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had occupied it; it traces the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis, and ultimately the cutural events that led a Jewish aristocratic family to deteriorate. In Voices from a Time, the main characters take turns in describing the family's life, its lore and demise, the cultural relevance and decadence. At the center of the whirling story is Gemma, a frivolous but fascinating woman, an adultress wife and irresponsible mother who behaves like an eternal child. Other family members try to keep up with Gemma and her eccentricities, and often end up the worst because of it. The backdrop of the story is the radiant mundane world of fin-de-siecle Jewish Trieste, where life becomes more vivid the more freedom is tethered. The translation is excellent - Martha King is one of the best indeed. The narrative is prismatic, yet incongruous.
The novel illustrates the resourceful adaptive nature of the Levi family while describing the loss that microcosmically operates upon each family member. Silvia Bonucci is deft at allowing for such tensions to mount without ever giving in to undue exuberance. It does lack the incredulity and nobility of novels written by such masters as Carlo Levi, Giorgio Bassani, Curzio Malaparte, or Ignazio Silone but it is a powerful work nonetheless. Intellectual, evocative, iridescent and political. However the author overstrains herself trying to implicate the psychoanalytical stamp unto the Jewish question, the woman question and finally the place of the eternally exiled. However it will please and infuriate, much as Toni Morrison's novels have the ability to do: but once again, please let us not confuse fine wine with grape juice. "Voices from a Time" is nonetheless a rewarding work of historical fiction.

The author retells a story over and over from different points of view. I can't quite get to the end of the book, I've lost interest.