Review: "The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro" by Viola Ardone

 

The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro by Viola Ardone, translated by Clarissa Botsford
Published May 2023 via HarperVia
★★★★★

These are the rules: Keep your eyes down, toe the line, stay home. Wear a white dress to your wedding and a black dress to funerals, hold the rosary beads, repeat the prayers, wait for the rosary to finish. Follow the road, look docile, nod. Don't go out alone, don't wear your skirt above your knee, don't talk directly to a man. Stay away from the boys, don't sing out loud, don't speak with your mouth full. Don't look at a man, don't wear lipstick, don't laugh with your mouth open, don't stand near the window.

Don't, don't, don't.

Oliva has always been good at following the rules. In 1960s Sicily, she knows no other way. The second daughter of a poor farmer, she knows that her lot in life is either to have a second-rate match found for her or to care for her parents in their old age. But the rules of girlhood, of womanhood, run far deeper than that. Here's the passage that made me sit up and take note:

Once, when we were parsing sentences, she [Oliva's teacher] dictated the phrase "A woman is equal to a man and has the same rights." We all bent our heads over our notebooks and started working on the exercise: "woman = feminine singular noun." I didn't like the sound of it.

"Maestra, the exercise must be wrong," I said, plucking up courage. My teacher touched her bouncy red curls that she never tied up.

"What do you mean, Oliva? I don't understand."


"Women is never in the singular," I explained.


She counted on her fingers: "A woman, singular, women, plural. What's the problem?"

But I wasn't satisfied. "A woman is never by herself: when she's home, she's with the kids; when she goes out to market, or church, or to a funeral, she's always with other people. And if there aren't any women to chaperone her, a man has to accompany her."

My teacher raised a finger in the air, the nail varnished bright red, and scrunched up her nose as she always did when she was thinking.

"I've never seen 'women' in the singular," I repeated timidly. (loc. 480)

This is beautiful work: Oliva cannot, in this passage, even register the ideas that men and women might be equal and women might have rights—she has not yet learned that a woman can be an individual, can exist outside the whims of others. It's early in the book, well before the more overt parts of the story, but it sets the scene for what Oliva is up against when she eventually defies society, and it sets the scene for a book rich in symbolism and imagery.

The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro is inspired by the case of Franca Viola, a Sicilian woman who refused to marry her rapist. Under Sicilian law at the time (the 1960s), if a rapist married his victim, his crime would be erased—and her "crime" of being raped would be forgiven. The same laws were used to facilitate elopements, which of course was used against women, or girls, who dared to resist. This isn't a practice unique to Sicily, but in Sicily it was called fuitina. The details are different enough that you can safely read the Wikipedia pages for Franca Viola and for fuitina without spoiling the book, but in any case Oliva Denaro (and her heart, I guess, but I prefer the editions that use just her name as the title) stands on her own.

I have a few reservations, as per usual. In particular, I'm not entirely sold on the way the last chapters are set up, and some of the resolutions are a bit tidy for my liking. I'd say 4.5 stars, which I usually round down, but this is one of the most gripping things I've read so far this year—I would have kept reading and reading to stay in Oliva's world.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley. Quotes are taken from an ARC and may not be final.