Anthony Cummins
Following the Male Gaze
Ferocity
By Nicola Lagioia (Translated by Antony Shugaar)
Europa Editions 447pp £13.99
What you make of this tangled tale of backhanders and blackmail in southern Italy may turn on whether you feel it perpetuates or merely portrays the misogyny at the novel’s heart. It’s tempting to judge the matter purely on the evidence of the prologue, in which an unnamed woman with a ‘full, taut pair of breasts’ wanders naked and bloodied on a motorway after midnight. She doesn’t, to the narrator’s evidently practised eye, look ‘much over thirty’, yet can’t be younger than twenty-five, thanks to ‘the intangible relaxing of tissues that turns the slenderness of certain adolescent girls into something perfect’.
Writing like this is bad in all sorts of ways. Yet the more I read Ferocity, which offers a horribly persuasive account of how male sexual violence can be a tool for consolidating wealth and power, the more I felt sure Nicola Lagioia had set out to do more than simply parrot the kind of objectification on show in a sentence such as this one: ‘She ... didn’t even feel the chilly metallic 500-watt power [of the streetlight] that once again revealed the curve of her waist.’ (Revealed to whom?)
We learn at the start of the novel proper that ‘she’ is 36-year-old Clara, a wealthy socialite apparently found dead after jumping from the top level of what Antony Shugaar’s otherwise plausible translation calls a ‘parking structure’. The press, claiming it’s suicide, pay attention because Clara is the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm