Le mosche d’oro

Defined as ‘Anna Banti’s most ambitious and daring novel’, Le mosche d’oro (The Golden Flies) tells the story of two lives mirroring each other: those of Libero Marcocci, an Italian painter of peasant origins, and Denise Ravier, a fragile and restless young bourgeois woman. They loved each other in bohemian Paris in the 1950s, and their relationship resulted in the birth of a son. But the illusion was shattered when the woman decided to abandon them both out of impatience and exhaustion. Libero thus faces the return home with the child, to a familiar yet at the same time foreign Italy; Denise, on the other hand, goes through a desperate sentimental diseducation, between luxury hotels and psychiatric clinics. In this story of ‘love and heartbreak’ – as Beatrice Manetti writes – Anna Banti broadens her narrative horizon to address the problems of the contemporary world, in particular the ‘myth of individual freedom’. The novelty of  Mosche d’oro lies not only in the ‘crossed editing’ of the chapters, between present and past, between the voice of Libero and that of Denise, but in an ‘inversion of gender roles’ where a man ‘decides to play the woman against the woman’. With incisive and introspective prose, the author portrays lives suspended between difficult choices and desires for redemption, against the backdrop of a Europe in turmoil, divided between those seeking worldliness and those emigrating to survive.