Eating Time: On Marosia Castaldi’s “The Hunger of Women”
Mariosa Castaldi, transl. Jamie Richards | The Hunger of Women | And Other Stories | 2023 | 224 Pages
The period, of all the punctuation marks, might be the most existential. Lurking behind that small dark dot floating so innocently, so unobtrusively on the page, lies an entire ethos of pause, of abbreviation, full stops and declarative statements. Grammatically, a period signals the end of something: quite literally, it’s the end of the sentence. The end of the thought. The end of the breath, when read aloud. An air of finality: hidden within every period is the trace of death.
It wasn’t always like this. In the West, the formal adoption of the period and other punctuation marks including the comma and the semicolon didn’t occur until late antiquity when it proved useful as a means of imposing order on otherwise unruly Greek and Latin scrolls. Previously, manuscripts were written as scriptio continua—that is, lacking all punctuation marks and even spacing between words—thus allowing for a greater sense of ambiguity and open interpretation for their readers, who had the freedom to insert their own pauses and rhythms into the text when reading aloud. This was a point of pride for their interpreters, evidence of their own mastery over the text: A 2015 BBC report on the origins of punctuation quotes Cicero, who told his audience that a sentence’s end “ought to be determined not by the speaker’s pausing for breath, or by a stroke interpreted by a copyist, but by the constraint of the rhythm.”
In The Hunger of Women, Italian writer Marosia Castaldi’s first novel to be translated into English (by Jamie Richards), we return to this old faith in innate rhythm. Castaldi, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 68, refrains entirely from using periods in the novel while documenting the observations and ruminations of Rosa, a middle-aged Neapolitan widow now living further north in Lombardy. Commas, too, are mostly done away with, also semicolons, exclamation marks, question marks, and ellipses. But Castaldi’s sentences are not long, multi-page, streams-of-consciousness in the sense of the Modernist writers famous for that technique—no 3,000 word screeds like the kind found in Ulysses. Rather, shorter sentences are structured in a familiar and clear pattern and rhythm, bound to the rules of clauses, subjects, and predicates, and organized into paragraphs that, too, are on the shorter side. Shorn of periods, all that’s left is capitalization to signal to the reader that a new sentence has begun.
The result is a book that at first glance still appears fairly conventional, not too different in its chunks of paragraphs and its approach to language than the more traditionally-punctuated volumes lined next to it on the bookshelf. But something happens when you sit down and read The Hunger of Women. Without periods, the sentences are freed from their endings and from a sense of completion. They clot together on the page and in the mind, running together and echoing against one another as though it were Rosa herself speaking breathlessly. By lacking something so fundamental as a period, The Hunger of Women asserts itself as not only a novel but also an exercise in how to transmute a book directly into a living human brain.
Not much happens in this novel: Rosa cooks, Rosa moves back to Naples, Rosa falls in love with one woman and then another. Her husband is now dead from a car crash, and with her adult daughter no longer in need of mothering she fills her days with these errant activities. But these activities, recurrent in their movements, allow Rosa to exist within a sense of time unbound by a socially-codified schedule. Listening to her neighbor vacuuming, Rosa thinks to herself early on in the novel that “the madness of clocks would be the death of her.” As a widow, Rosa has entered a different understanding of time and its allotments, one removed from the linear progression for heterosexual women as dictated by girlhood, marriage, and childbirth.
“He fell into a coma and I made the momentous decision to pull the plug Since then the wisdom of the ages has nestled in my memory.” For a woman who has spent much of her life in service to the needs of her family, “the wisdom of the ages”—a phrase that will be repeated as the book continues—means most often food and its life-giving properties, as produced from recipes that have been handed down through the generations, collapsing time in the process. “Only by passing down her love for making food that her mother had passed down to her did she find a crumb of eternity on this earth,” Rosa thinks of her own “noble” mother, “consumed by the extreme domesticity that corroded her life.” Food “conserves the nature of the ages and the wisdom of God.” Ecstatic descriptions of food, its tastes and its smells, are recorded in the pages of this book in the form of the recipes that Rosa cooks, first for herself and for her daughter and later for her lesbian lovers and the patrons of a restaurant that Rosa opens upon her return to her native Naples. In this, a kind of immortality is achieved: though the taste of food may be ephemeral, the recipes endure. When Rosa makes a recipe, she is invoking and recreating all the other moments in the past when this recipe might have been enjoyed.
This is an experience of time that functions exclusively for women, as the feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva observed in her 1981 essay, “Women’s Time”: “when evoking the name and destiny of women, one thinks more of the space generating and forming the human species than of time, becoming or history.” Castaldi, too, writes of time as a thing that at once shapes and yet is at odds with the lived experiences of women, who are dependent on the relationships shared between women as mothers and daughters, friends, and lovers. When her daughter leaves for university, Rosa, alone in her kitchen, finds herself mentally returning to the past: “I was satisfied with the madness of the age-old knowledge of food and cooking contained within my hands The madness of food revived the deafening roar of the God of time that lived in revelry and the clocks’ tick-tock We’ll all of us die from the madness of clocks.” Clock time, with its rote progression, extinguishes, destroying its watchers’ sanity, while this other form of time—Rosa’s time—revives.
It is through her relationships with the women in her life that Rosa is able to understand herself more fully as a human being. “With this woman,” Rosa reflects on one of her lovers, “I could play the man or the mother although I didn’t want roles or fictions I wanted to be myself.” Hands, like food, are a frequent motif, and human touch becomes linked with God and the divine: “I put her hands in mine—Reader—It was the miracle of the host repeated in the form of love It was the transubstantiation of bodies the metamorphosis of food in flesh and the transubstantiation of one flesh into another.” In the same way that Catholic doctrine teaches that the Communion wafer and wine are miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Christ through the process of transubstantiation, Rosa’s ecstatic communion with other women turns touch into something holy, these earthly bodies and the substances that feed them a source of spiritual nourishment akin to the Eucharist.
Castaldi’s exploration of the transformative possibilities hidden within the interpersonal relationships shared between women brings to mind the work of another Italian woman writer, one whose wild popularity in the Anglosphere in recent years has helped usher in a boom of Italian women writers in translation: Elena Ferrante. Like Ferrante’s concept of frantumaglia, a uniquely-female fragmentation of the self, Castaldi’s portrayal of these relationships also emphasizes their underlying pliability, the ways in which women throughout generations are linked to one another and how social roles and identities can blur when freed from the constraints of men.
It is an approach that is undoubtedly informed by Italian feminist thinking, with its emphasis on language, as seen in works like the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective’s 1987 Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice. (A book that Ferrante, too, counts as an influence, citing it in her 2022 essay collection In the Margins). Among many of its revelations, the writers of Sexual Difference argue that, without a “female-gendered language,” women will find themselves and their sense of “female experience…imprisoned in itself, without social translation.” Castaldi’s rejection of punctuation offers an alternative: Without the guiding markers of punctuation, the language of The Hunger of Women turns circular, cyclical, its sentences and their described experiences repeating certain phrases until they blur into themselves, just as recipes into time and hands into bodily boundaries.
Unlike Sexual Difference and Ferrante’s novels, though, Castaldi openly embraces queerness and love and sex between women as a transformative possibility. In a passage describing sex between Rosa and her lover Edda, a woman from the south of Italy, Castaldi uses the same intensely-sensual language that she uses in her descriptions of food, hands, and touch:
Naked she was beautiful and tragic in the absolute nudity that lives inside the things that exist without being seen Her inviolate body said to me Love me I am only for you I went to the bed and I bent and bent to lick her pubis and her siren girl’s lips as she moaned in my arms over loves past present and future She wanted to be only for me
In the same way that cooking functions in this novel as an opportunity for women to transfer knowledge over the course of generations, sex between women in The Hunger of Women also changes the passing of time into a compounded moment. Rival lovers “past present and future” coalesce into a unified other through the act of lovemaking, and Rosa and Edda in this moment enter into a continuous present inhabited only by themselves. Meanwhile, linear time is something that Rosa evokes when she thinks disparagingly of her life’s previous trajectory divided into discrete units and stages via the standard narratives of heterosexuality and wifedom. Upon noticing her daughter’s disapproval, she thinks, “My daughter looked at me circumspect She was in the phase of life where you love a man you want to have children and a family The peaceful harbor of lesbian love was alien to her.”
So, too, is the neatly constrained barrier separating reader from character turned porous in The Hunger of Women. Throughout the novel, Rosa frequently addresses the reader, inserting every now and then a declarative address—“Reader”—in between and separating her thoughts from one another, this directive becoming its own kind of punctuation. For the English-speaking reader, this interjection immediately brings to mind Jane Eyre’s famous line—“Reader, I married him.”—but so too does it work to remind us of the essential artificiality of the novel, its constraints and its history. It’s a sly way for Castaldi to play with the tensions between her punctuation-free prose, with its breathless qualities, and the simple fact that these are words committed to the page, with the intention of being read by another. Here’s Castaldi, as quoted by translator Jamie Richards in her afterword:
I’ve never used commas much. I tend to eliminate them; they are an obstacle…If a punctuation mark is abolished or used scarcely, if an unusually long space is placed between one word and another, if there are fifty paragraph breaks or none, it’s because you want the page to be, not to represent, what you want to say. Writing can’t circle around its object, it must forge it every time anew.
Though we may be drawn into a certain rhythm as we read, this is not scriptio continua, and open to our own interpretations as the reader; this is a book that has been massaged by Castaldi into a certain rhythm deliberately.
In her elimination of periods, Castaldi banishes limits from the page. Even in the novel’s last few paragraphs, there is a sense of circularity, of things repeating themselves and endings transformed into beginnings. The final word of the book, “God,” is also the word in which the beginnings of our very universe and time-scape, according to Christian theology, can be found: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Freed of endings, time repeats itself. Time transforms itself, and by the end of The Hunger of Women, Castaldi has, like the priest, performed a transubstantiation of her own, turning the time metered out in the pages of a book into one woman’s search for a world without end.