Photo: Basso Cannarsa
The author's books are translated in England Germany France
Margherita Giacobino. Writer, journalist and translator, Margherita Giacobino was born in Turin, where she lives and works. He made his debut in 1993 with An American in Paris (Baldini & Castoldi), an elegant feminist novel published under the pseudonym of Elinor Rigby that has attracted the attention of critics and journalists such as Aldo Busi, Natalia Aspesi and Carmen Covito. She is the author of numerous short stories published in the Principesse Azzurre anthology series published by Mondadori, of the collection The pioneers of sex (Il Dito e La Luna, 2000) and numerous essays including Wake up little girls! (Zelig, 1996) written in collaboration with Pat Carra. Among his novels, Housewives in hell (Baldini & Castoldi, 1996), an international best seller that anticipated the glorious trend of American female fiction; CB's sentimental education (The Turtle, 2007); Death is young , written under the pseudonym of Rita Gatto and published by Salani in 2009; The egg out of the cavagno (Elliot, 2010); Family portrait with fat little girl (Mondadori, 2015), translated into France (Stock), Germany (Kunstmann) and the United Kingdom (Dedalus Ltd), The Price of the Dream (Mondadori, 2017), fictionalized biography of Patricia Highsmith and fresco of an era whose rights to translation were sold in the UK (Dedalus); The ridiculous age ( Mondadori 2018). Your Look at Me was published on January 12, 2021.
Title: The Look on Me
Author: Margherita Giacobino
Publisher: Mondadori, 2021, pp. 204
Rights: r.vivian literary agency
"A mother who everyone envied them, beautiful, progressive and who in old age even becomes a witch and falls in love. The witch, writes the writer, possesses a charm superior to that of youth because she does not care about pleasure, she possesses herself, she explores herself, she listens to herself, she holds the threads of her life in her hand. She lights up the looks, attracts desires. And her mother of desires and looks, of women and men, has attracted more than it has happened to her. "
The Voice of New York - www.lavocedinewyork.com
«To love is a continuous exercise of translation from I to you and vice versa. Writing, a stubborn attempt at translation from the glimpsed infinity into the finite given to us ».
Your look on me
"Great book [...] A hard book, but surprisingly hilarious." - Margherita Oggeto, TuttoLibri (La Stampa)
"Delicious, bright, vibrant." - Conventional
“ The ridiculous age is a novel that seems like a long conversation between different generations in which, however, the problems are always there, halfway between love and pain. [...] A novel that wants to underline how much the meaning of growing up is transversal to age, to ways of being and becoming. "
"A novel with a hilarious, amusing, but never banal plot, in which an accurate investigation of human behavior, the conflict between different cultures, the true value of love and loneliness are mixed." - About the Novel
Title: The Ridiculous Age
Author: Margherita Giacobino
Publisher: Mondadori, 2018, pp. 271
Rights: r.vivian literary agency
Translated into English by Dedalus with the support of Cepell
Title: Family portrait with a fat little girl
Author: Margherita Giacobino
Publisher: Mondadori, 2015, pp. 283
Rights: r.vivian literary agency
Translated into French by Stock Editions, in England by Dedalus
“It has been a while since our fiction had not raised such an authentic voice, foreign to masquerades, artificial inks, stale, biographical escape routes. [...] very watched pages and, at the same time, very vivid, the form that does not swallow up the substance, but the halo. " - Bruno Quaranta (TuttoLibri - La Stampa)
“The novel that Margherita Giacobino proposes to us is a banquet set. [...] It is a novel to approach with an empty stomach and let oneself be gorged with stories, generous morsels that will give us an overall portrait at the end but will still leave us hungry, eager to know more, to know more. Or to hear it told again, all over again, again, just like grandma's stories. " - Literary Criticism
“Margherita Giacobino's capacity for penetration, empathy, reconstruction that is not trivially psychological but human is extraordinary, with which she outlines her feelings, character, idiosyncrasies. Because here it is not a question of carrying out a nostalgia operation, but rather of tracing life in all its manifestations. [...] Like all family stories that span several generations, it can be read as a simple story of people, or instead as a compendium of Italian history of the twentieth century. [...] It is a book about which there is a lot to say, and at the same time it is an extremely simple book, with the simplicity of the necessary books. " - Consolata Lanza
"L'écrivaine fait entendre le dialecte de l'enfance dont les expressions, modestes leçons de vie, constitueront son
"Moral backbone". On traverse ainsi le XXe siècle par les marges. [...] Le récit déborde d'une loyauté respectueuse a l'égard de ces obscures travailleuses. [...] Margherita Giacobino qui doit son prénom à la benjamine de ses tantes maternelles, cette Margherita. [...] to here the narrator doit le goût de l'humour, un de ses plus précieux legs. " - Livres Hebdo
“The family saga of Margherita Giacobino starts from the Canavese countryside of the late nineteenth century, a farmhouse where we all live together, young old people and children subjected to the laws of tradition; she is ferried into the modernity of city life since the two world wars, from the horizon of the fields to that of the factory; it witnesses the economic boom and then the crisis of today, with a single great leitmotif, the dialect as a visceral way of expression, as a mother tongue. " - South Tyrol
" Portrait of a family with a fat girl is a necessary novel, which has the urgency and beauty of necessity, written with a lucidity that does not close its eyes to the distortions and violence of history, to the disparity in the relationship between men and women , to the injustice of poverty, but also to the possibility of freeing oneself from all this through the courage of choices of autonomy. " - Nicoletta Buonapace