sewn paper
FICTION / Canadian
October 2007
224 pages
EAN 978-0-88984-295-3
$22.95

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Bambina

A sparkling novel set in the Rome of the Sixties, when La Dolce Vita and the economic boom take hold of this quiet city shaped by a grandiose past. The piazzas and monuments of Rome are the playground of Eugenia, the young daughter of a cosmopolitan family, and the narrator of Bambina.

In an intensely personal language, by turns nattering and poetic, Eugenia observes those around her (the priest on a beach holiday, the maid Matilde, the eccentric visitors, the playboy aristocrat, her international school-mates) and how their lives intersect, as through a kaleidoscope.

The diary-style narrative takes us from the time Eugenia is a child to the summer she turns fifteen. In a story suffused with a brilliant sense of place and time, we walk down the Spanish Steps at night, and we meander through the shaded lanes of Capri. Shy, ironic, disarming, always hopeful of romance, even when her familiar landscape begins to shift, Eugenia uses her heart and her zany philosophy to navigate the joys and torments of a happy childhood.

`A sparkling mind illuminates a colourful city and an intriguing adolescence.'
     -- Tim Parks

`Bambina is as unique as it is enchanting. Francesca Piredda's protagonist, Eugenia, is an astonishing creation.'
     -- Patricia Young

`Francesca Piredda captures the unique, unrepeatable, irredeemable intensities of childhood.... Multilayered, cosmopolitan, innocent and sly, cynical and enamoured, disenchanted and full of wonder, Eugenia takes us with her on her ``sentimental education'', a voyage as rich and varied as life itself.'
     -- Gilbert Reid

`While it's a moot point whether these reveries really are based on the author's own life, they are so well drawn that they have the weight and feel of reality. The reveries are full of sharply observed detail, and delivered in a strong, appealing voice. In one that recalls Proust's famous madeleines, Eugenia describes an infatuation, at age 8, with mayonnaise. In the dark of night, she used to steal down to the family kitchen, open the Frigidaire and reach for the ``tube of Maionese Kraft. My prey. I would twist off the top and suck it in big long gulps. I think the spout was serrated, to make a pretty effect when decorating a dish. I swallowed serrated mayonnaise. Then, although nobody took the trouble to forbid stealing mayonnaise, I'd try to cover my tracks, plump the tube up, and feverishly twist the top back on the wrong way. I closed the door, which made an infernal racket, and returned, le coeur barbouillé, with a smeared heart, queasy, to bed where I dreamt such dreams as I could.'' '
     -- Montreal Gazette