The Women of Saturn, a novel by Connie Guzzo-McParland (Inanna Publications, 2017), is a gargantuan tale of the stories of a wave of immigrants emerging from a small town, Mulirena, in the mountains of Italy into their various lives and locales in Montreal in the latter half of the 20th c. told through a narrator, Caterina, Cathy or Cat. The narrator is a writer weaving vignettes collected over half a century into a breathing behemoth of a book. The writing is concise and clear, the history is well-researched and there are no untied ends in the stories - by the end, they all interweave in a Felliniesque pantomime during one of the strangest and most compelling Halloweens I have ever read. The unreality of the masquerade spreads between a Montreal underworld and cemeteries to a land-ownership struggle and death in the remote town in Italy, where the promises of past cannot be re-constituted. The novel is “an attempt to preserve memories,”** and to explicate, through its stories of generations, some core truths of what being Italian-Canadian means. What is pushing out from this novel, for me, though, is an underlying magma of metaphor that is not stable, does not configure into recognizable patterns, is fiery enough to prevent the stories from spilling into banal gossip told by aging old-country nonnas and bisnonno, which escapes anchors and pulses with a molten gold that paints each of the portraits of each of the characters with searing vision. At its heart, The Women of Saturn is a book of ‘harvesting dreams, unlocking them, their fears, “and presenting them to the world,”*** of a woman overcoming the repressions of the molds for women for millennia to write, to roam with her fierce creativity and intellect in the unrelenting, spinning, intersecting circularnesses the dynamic mandalas of her imagination form.
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*p. 38; ** p. 283; *** p. 24.
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