Paying back

Ezercizzi ta’ tortura u seduzzjoni’ Author: Irene Chias

Publisher: Horizons

Year: 2022

Pages: 410

The author comes from Erice, Sicily. After working as a journalist for many years in France and in Milan, in 2019 she relocated to Malta.

Here she works with Corriere di Malta and sends regular updates about what is happening in Malta, mostly about the Covid pandemic, to TgCom24 in a blog entitled Molto Malta.

She has written three novels and other stories.

The present book is a translation, by Mark Vella, of her novel esercizi di sevizia e seduzione published by Mondadori, which in 2014, won the Premio Mondello Opera Italiana and the Mondello Giovani.

Her novel is an exemplar of contemporary feminist literature built on a substratum of irony. A woman who is fed up with the culture of abuse, both in the media and in reality, decides to take a sort of literary revenge – with herself as the abuser and unexceptional men as the victims of her torture.

The book speaks about the literary excursions of Ignazia, born of Sicilian parents who lives in Milan where she sometimes works as an architect. Who would want to correct and punish with excerpts from literature the incorrect behaviour of the male, the male of the species.

She wants to counteract the veneer of normalcy built upon the sexual abuse inflicted by males on females. Her secret personal mission on behalf of all women, far away from all feminist protest marches, but far away too from the stereotypes of Sex and the City, is to turn around the literature of all time where violence on woman is considered normal while the contrary, violence on men, is considered as horrible.

Without any special effort, she seduces and captures ordinary and normal men, frightens and immobilizes her victims, without being overly violent against them. She reads to her victims excerpts from literature but turns them around to the opposite gender – the Bateman mouse in the novel American Psycho by Ellis, Alex in the A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, the Levite from Ephrem in the Old Testament (Judges 19), the warriors who deflower the African women in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s book.

There are other references to literature, from Bolano to Maya Angelou, from Coetzee to Gunter Grass to Michel Houellebecq.

These stories are carefully wound up with Ignazia’s own life, her family, her sisters, so different from her, and her best friend, who is in a toxic relationship. And Ignazia’s own latest love affair with Michele, a hypochondriac gynaecologist who keeps writing his thoughts in a secret diary.

The writing, or maybe the translation, is dense and only those who have an intimate experience of Milan would understand the topography and its implications. It was quite courageous on the part of the publisher to come out with this book, its theme and the very graphic terms used.

Her first novel was Sono ateo e ti amo

(Elliot) in 2010 followed by the book being reviewed here and then Non cercare l’uomo capra (Laurana) in 2016 about migration and diversity and lastly in 2020 Fiore d’agave, fiore di scimmia

published by Laurana, which is also being translated into Maltese.