<p>Game Plan for a Novel (Lettera all'editore) follows a group of men and women working their way through life, love and relationships as a game of cards keeps bringing them together. But Manzini is really about the game of fiction. An author's letter to her editor explains the development of an idea. It reveals the game plan for her work: how the characters appear in her imagination, how they resemble people she knows - or how they resemble her - and how she will manipulate them, her memories and her feelings to turn them all into fiction. Gianna Manzini is considered one of the most accomplished writers in Italy, praised by important literary critics and writers, and widely known by Italian readers. She belongs to that same illustrious "society of writers" as Pavese, Brancati, Moravia, Pasolini, Pratolini, Gadda, Soldati and Buzzati. With the appearance of her first novel, Tempo innamorato, narrative in Italy began to undergo "an experiment of lyrical expression." Manzini's first novel in English translation introduces readers to a writer perfecting her prose, sharpening her powers of observation and interacting with her characters. Manzini's art is "the means for seeking the life behind life." Gianna Manzini's fiction been compared to that of Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, and Paul Valery."</p>

Game Plan for a Novel

Literature & Fiction

Manzini, Gianna

Literary

Italica Press, Inc.

Threshold

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

Gianna Manzini’s "Threshold" ("Sulla soglia") was first published in 1973. It still packs an immediacy of emotion and personal subjectivity unique in experimental fiction. This short novel takes an introspective look at a daughter’s relationship to her mother’s last days. We follow the first-person narrator on a trip not quite like others from a train station not quite of this world. "Threshold" captures the conflicting emotions and the closeness of loved ones through the intimacy of material objects. By highlighting the power of materiality, Manzini develops a storyline that frames her reflections on the relationship between parent and child. Manzini skillfully constructs a virtual reality through a language that leads her readers to imagine other possibilities. The dreamlike quality of her writing moves the reader across the border of the real to the imagined and back again. The novel’s evocative and slippery use of symbolism self-consciously confuses temporality and the blurry boundaries between space and perspective. Threshold joins "Game Plan of a Novel" (2008) and "Full-Length Portrait" (2011), two other novels by this highly original Italian writer published by Italica Press. “With this astutely presented and translated novella, "Threshold," Laura E. Ruberto and Irena Stanic Rasin give readers a rare opportunity to experience Gianna Manzini’s art of storytelling, among Italy’s finest. The first lines sweep us into a suspenseful journey on the verge of life beyond life, amidst sights, sounds, and sensations as traces of meanings for understanding the mysteries of love, disease, the power of memory and writing, and death.” — Robin Pickering-Iazzi, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Preface, Introduction, Note on the Translation, Select Bibliography. 106 pages.

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