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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Clara Sereni

Clara_Sereni_(Roma,_1991 pd).jpg
Clara Sereni at home in Rome, 1991 (Photo: from the family archive via Wikimedia Commons p.d.)

Clara Sereni was born in 1946 in Rome and lived there until, in 1991, she moved to Perugia, where she lived until her voluntary assisted death in Switzerland in 2018. Her mother, Xenia Silberberg, was the daughter of two Russian revolutionaries; her father, Emilio Sereni, originally from an upper-class Roman-Jewish family, was a leading member of the Italian Communist Party between the 1930s and the 1970s.

In her 20s, she worked as a secretary, conference organiser, and occasional folk singer, and was involved in the radical leftist group Lotta Continua. Between 1995 and 1997 she was Deputy Mayor of Perugia. Being what she defined as ‘the handicapped mother’ of a son living with psychosis led to her becoming, in 1998, one of the founders of La Città del Sole, a non-profit foundation which provides holiday accommodation and support for families of people with mental health issues; she was its President until 2009. In 2010 she co-founded and directed le farfalle, a series with the Perugia publisher Ali&No which produces books about women who have contributed to Italian history, science, politics, and humanitarian activities in other continents.

All Sereni’s work has a strongly autobiographical component, straddling the line between fiction, autobiography, and autofiction: she describes her experiences within her family, at work, as the mother of a difficult son, her Jewishness, her political activities, friendships, and relationships as fragments of 20th-century Italian history. Her first novel, Sigma Epsilon (1974), overlooked by readers and reviewers, contains vivid descriptions of women’s secondary role in left-wing culture. Her second book, Casalinghitudine (1987), made her known inside and outside Italy; the title, Sereni’s own neologism, quickly became part of the Italian vocabulary. The text foregrounds food as a metonym for cultures, power relations, and the narrated self’s subjectivity. Il gioco dei regni (1993), her most complex and wide-ranging work, is a reconstruction of the complicated history of three generations of her extended family, in Russia, Italy, other European countries, and Israel. Her conflicts and disappointments in the Perugia town council are described, in a thinly fictionalised account, in the novel Passami il sale (2002). Il lupo mercante (2007) is also a collection of stories, told from the point of view of women who were little girls in the 1950s, teenagers in the 1960s, and politically and socially active women between the 1970s and the beginning of the new century. Many of their experiences mirror those narrated in Sereni’s previous autobiographical accounts. Her last book, Via Ripetta 155 (2015), set between 1967 and 1977, is a further retrieval of her own personal and political development; her hopes and mistakes are recontextualised, with ruthless honesty and irony, against the hopes and mistakes of her generation, and, at the end of the decade, against their personal and collective bitterness at what they saw as their failure to change the world.

The less directly autobiographical works also deal with Sereni’s recurrent themes of marginalization, solidarity, and relationship between the personal and the political, seen mainly through women’s perspectives. Le merendanze (2004) is about a group of Italian women who get to know migrant women through shared involvement in a fund-raising project; Sereni promoted a similar project and, as she did with casalinghitudine, created a word for it: merendanzo, a blend of merenda (snack) and pranzo (lunch). The stories in the collections Manicomio primavera (1989) and Eppure (1995) represent various forms of diversity (relating to health, age, sexuality, ethnicity) and envisage tentative possibilities for private and public survival. Una storia chiusa (2012) is a multi-voiced text focused on the tension between collective memory and individual memories: a group of elderly residents of a retirement village are, in different ways, lonely, disenchanted, and frustrated at what Italy has become 60 years since the end of WWII, with only small threads of stubborn hope holding them together.

Sereni also wrote on political and social topics for the left-wing newspapers L’Unità and Il manifesto. Some of these articles have been collected in Taccuino di un’ultimista (1998): Sereni often used the word ultimista, someone who takes the side of the people at the bottom of the social heap, as one of the ways she could define herself. She also edited Si può, a collection of essays on the integration of people with mental illnesses (1996), and Amore caro, a collection of testimonies from well-known Italians who live with disabilities, their own or those of a loved one (2009), and translated French literary works by Balzac, Stendhal, and Madame de La Fayette.

She was awarded two prizes for Il gioco dei regni (Premio Società dei Lettori in 1992-1993 and Premio Marotta in 1993) and for Passami il sale (Premio Letterario Nazionale di Pisa in 2002 and Premio Grinzane Cavour in 2003).

Sereni never identified as a feminist, but in one of her last interviews she stated: ‘I told many more stories of women than of men […] because women seem to be richer in contradictions than men, and contradictions are key to every possible story’. In Via Ripetta 155 she acknowledges that her viewing of her conflicts with men as personal rather than political was a mistake: ‘I could not see many things that were happening close to me, such as feminism. Feminism did change me, but I did not realise it’.

Her work has not received as much critical attention as it deserves, but scholars in Italy and the United States have analysed her way of tracing the intersections between personal and public histories and between secular Jewishness and Italian culture.

Compiled by Mirna Cicioni (Melbourne)