Word: cornelisen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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VENDETTA OF SILENCE by Ann Cornelisen. 242 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown...
What English heaths were to Thomas Hardy, the mountains of southern Italy are to Ann Cornelisen. In the isolated villages of the Lucanian Apennines, she has stumbled upon that ominous interaction between dour people and stark environment that comes to be called fate...
Torregrecca (1969), Miss Cornelisen's first book-length portrait of this living past, was a small classic. A documentary written like a novel, it dramatized a cultural collision that set a slightly brash ex-Vassar girl trying to organize nursery centers against a cast of southern Italians as passively resistant as one of their mountain roads. Vendetta of Silence is a novel written like a documentary. "At the request of my publishers and my lawyer, I have agreed to call this a novel," the author comments in a prefatory note to what, among other things, is a murder story...
...town hates a survivor. To be happy is to earn a curse. When Marina crumbles at the prospect of malice and decides to abort their child, Marco kills himself-apparently. Even suicide is subtle in San Basilio. The sight of lives strangled by dead traditions offends Miss Cornelisen to the bottom of her reforming American soul. "Change is possible," she insists. "The future cannot be postponed forever." But what gives her theme the tension of tragedy is that she also loves her characteis- God help her!-as they...
...eloquence, in the fullness of her heart, trying to find the way in. The final punishment for San Basilic is not that its people are cut off from the rest of the world but that they are cut off from themselves. "Sympathy cannot penetrate real desperation," Miss Cornelisen writes. That can stand as her last word for San Basilio-and for the honorable failure of a first-rate artist...