We, the Caserta (Nosotros, Los Caserta)

We, the Caserta (Nosotros, Los Caserta)

Novel
Tusquets Editores, 2022
256 pages

Published by

Spanish in the World Tusquets Editores / Italy Sur / France Laffont / Brazil Fósforo / USA Soft Skull / Portugal Penguin Random House / Germany DTV / Denmark Lindhardt

Available for other countries

Prize Domani, Verona, 1969
Prize Pirandello d’oro Della Collegiatura di Sicilia,1969

A gifted young woman builds her own world outside her environment, a decadent family of Sicilian origin.

Chela Stradolini goes through a trunk of papers and photos, memories of an exile that give an account of her biography. She, who was never anything to anyone, does not even get emotional when facing the death of her great love, an impossible story, like almost all the relationships she has had throughout her life. The revision of those objects of hers takes her to her childhood as a rich girl, gifted, too skinny, and too dark for the bourgeois taste of the time. Adolescence in a boarding school, the discovery of literature, escapades to Chile, Paris and Rome. The eccentricity of wealthy families in interwar Europe. And a trip to Sicily, to the Caserta estate, in search of a lineage, and to meet her great-aunt, with whom she will finally live a passionate romance.

All that is Chela, and nights of sleeping pills and tranquilizers; elixirs to soothe the pain. In the background, the last attempts of a decadent oligarchy to stay on its feet.

Beauty in ugliness, fragility in the harsh reaction against contempt, love in pain: by Aurora Venturini, as only she can. Claudia Piñeiro

Lucidity is priceless. ABC

Nosotros, los Caserta is a brilliant, provoking, ambitious and deliberately, anachronistic novel. Clarín, Ñ

In Venturini’s writing there is a power that marks whoever dares to read it. She enters literature to leave a wound. Página 12

A wild intelligence. La Nación

Venturini has the ability to make us completely lose our fear of language. Andrea Abreu