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“I saw that uncertainty about the body – which is, after all, uncertainty about matters of life and death – could be remade into a kind of defiance.”
"[A] soulful, moving, sometimes cacophonous account of European women’s experiences and interior lives from about 1500 to 1800."—The New York Times Book Review
In 1610, Lucia Pivinelli stood before a judge in Bologna. She was accused of committing infanticide. But Lucia knew that she had not killed the infant. She held fast to the truth in court, and in prison, and under torture; she declaimed the truth again when the tribunal’s midwives inspected her body. She did not waver from her story even when her former partner, Sabatino, called her a liar in court, nor when the judge pressed her again and again and again to admit that she had killed her own child. Finally, Lucia had had enough. I can hear her, exasperated, and resolute: ‘It was not [born] alive,’ she declared to the judge, ‘and I will never be able to say why it was not, and I cannot do anything about this … it pleased God that it was born dead, and I don’t know what to make of it.’ Lucia’s voice rings out with defiance. She was telling the truth. ‘May God pardon me all my sins,’ she said, ‘but may he never pardon me this one.’ No crime had been committed; there was nothing to forgive. Lucia was in her early twenties. She had given birth less than two weeks before.
I don’t know what to make of it. As I read over Lucia’s words, I was struck not only by her boldness but by the way she claimed her own uncertainty. I don’t know what to make of it. Neither did I. I had given birth, breastfed; I had been pregnant, had an abortion; my sleep had shattered. I had struggled with new desires: for freedom, for a new kind of writing, for a truer independence. And I knew that I had transformed – that I was a different person than I had been – but I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t have the language to describe these transformations. I felt them in my flesh, but I could not make any meaning from them. I had experienced that uncertainty as a burning shame – as something that, perhaps, required forgiveness. But in Lucia’s statement to the court, I saw that uncertainty about the body – which is, after all, uncertainty about matters of life and death – could be remade into a kind of defiance.
More info on the book (US)»
UK/Ireland»
The US publisher’s site, down at the time of writing, is here.
If you doubted Twin Peaks: The Return makes Mr Lynch look a bigger diddy than Mr Trump, you must admit that even Trump wouldn’t cast himself in a fictional world containing so many clowns and scumbags as a red-blooded Übermensch and two supreme divinities minimum.
He’d manage the clowns and scumbags and Übermensch parts no problem, but he wouldn’t then cast himself as the god of everything manly, and of judgement and the rest. He’s not so demented that he never listens to his advisers, and they’ve stopped him committing acts far tamer than casting himself as the Egyptian deity Thoth.
Ivanka’s rolled eyes alone might tell him that’s too vain, beyond the pale, damaging to his brand, while even Newsmax might have to tell him he’d crossed a line. He may be the second-biggest diddy in history but he’s not that big a diddy.
It’s one thing to announce at Thanksgiving that what you’re most grateful for is your own remarkable nature; it’s another entirely to cast yourself among Unterentwickelt Menschen as the divine essence of judgement, wisdom, writing, hieroglyphs, science, magick, art, and the dead, and wise counsellor to Osiris.
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