Francesca Melandri

Eva Sleeps

Translated by Katherine Gregor 

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Much in the way that Grass’s The Tin Drum allegorizes Poland and Germany and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children allegorizes India and Pakistan, regarding the idea of nation and contested land, this novel, translated from Italian, allegorizes the ethnically German region of northern Italy in which German terrorists and the Italian government struggle for control in the mid-twentieth century.  The character Gerda, lusted after by men, is emblematic of the beautiful and fought-over land. Her daughter Eva, the symbolic product of this fissure, has two fathers: one German and one Italian. Eva, as her name implies, represents new beginnings. She becomes bilingual and bicultural, and although she doesn’t completely reconcile the split between the two cultures to which she belongs, she eventually arrives at a psychical space where she feels at home.