Chiara Frugoni in the new collection of Éditions de l’EHESS

The Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales de Paris have announced the creation of a new collection, ‘Apartès’, intended to host ‘short and original texts, in which narrative and subjective experimentation mingle with social sciences’. Among the first titles, the French translation of historian Chiara Frugoni‘s book, Perfino le stelle devono separarsi (Feltrinelli, 2013).

Même les étoiles doivent se séparer

“I am the last witness of the Middle Ages”: it is with this serious joke that Chiara Frugoni presents the return to the age of her childhood that we are about to read. This leap in time is also a movement in space: the historian leaves the places of university research to take the cobbled paths that lead to Solto, a village in upper Bergamo, where her maternal grandparents’ house is located.
The city schoolgirl, granddaughter of landowners, shares her carefree summers in the country with the children of the tenant farmers of the family farm. This autobiography does not conceal any feelings or sentiments, which are by turns tender or harsh. Against the backdrop of a peasant world that the affluent society will overcome, it is inhabited by a constant, sometimes painful back-and-forth between characters from two social classes and shows in striking detail their daily activities and the material framework of their existence.
Memories of a vanished world, illuminated by the evocation of those lives that have not yet said their last word.

Translated from the Italian by Denis Matringe, revised by Lucien d’Azay and Mattia Gallo

http://www.editions.ehess.fr/no_cache/ouvrages/ouvrage/meme-les-etoiles-doivent-se-separer/