Life, Brazen and Garish: A Tale of Three Women

Three generations of women live together under the same roof. Though they are united by blood, each of the Cascadei women has a very different personality and way of expressing herself. Teenage daughter Lori scribbles impulsively in her diary, so eager to speed off on her moped that she rarely bothers with punctuation. Mother Maria, a professional translator, writes detailed and observant letters yet doesn’t see what is happening right in front of her. And grandmother Gesuina, a former stage actress, speaks into an audio recorder, giving a provocative and brutally candid performance for an imagined audience that might never listen.

Life, Brazen and Garish offers a fresh take on the epistolary novel, telling the story of a family through the fragmented and disparate perspectives of daughter, mother, and grandmother. Yet even as each woman endures her private struggles with love and betrayal, youth and maturity, knowledge and ignorance, reality and illusion, the Cascadeis forge a solidarity that transcends generations. In turns heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, this novel is a triumph of narrative voice and literary style from one of Italy’s most renowned writers.

Questo libro è stato tradotto grazie a un contributo del Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale italiano.
This book has been translated thanks to a contribution from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

DACIA MARAINI is one of Italy’s most pre-eminent and beloved writers. She has written over thirty plays and numerous novels, including In Praise of Disobedience: Clare of Assisi, A Novel (Rutgers University Press).

ELVIRA DI FABIO is a former senior preceptor in Romance languages and literatures and director of language programs at Harvard University. She has translated several texts by Italian authors, Dacia Maraini, Angelo Montonati, and others. She lives in Massachusetts.

SARAH TEARDO is a lecturer in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University and a specialist of contemporary Italian literature and women writers. She is the co-translator of The Reprisal: A Novel by Laudomia Bonanni and lives in New Jersey.