Meeting in Positano

Meeting in Positano (translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore) by Goliarda Sapienza 256 pages

What attracted me to this novel was that it was set in Positano, a town south of Naples on the Amalfi coast. I love Italian settings. Picking up the book paid off because Positano is more than a setting; it’s a character in the book.  Author Sapienza does a wonderful job describing its beauty.

Sapienza worked as an actress from the late 1940s to the early ‘50s.  She made six films and after worked dried up, she worked in other areas of the movie industry. However, after her death in 1996, her husband found several novels that she had written and began publishing them.

In this novel, she is scouting locations and meets Erica Beneventano, a lovely widow. The two women become very intimate friends, not lovers but almost. This story is a bit confusing. First, I was never completely sure who the narrator was. It’s supposed to Goliarda, but at times I felt as if the words were coming from Erica. And at other times, the plot seemed more like a memoir than a fictional piece, especially since author Goliarda uses her own name as her character’s name (that was really off-putting).

Basically this is Erica’s life story. The book could also be labeled as “based on a true story,” with Erica taking the lead as most of the story was hers. As Goliarda goes about her movie business, the two women become very close, not lover-close, by closer than sisters.

Life was not easy for Erica. She was a middle sister, forced to go to work at an early age, married to one of her father’s ex-business associates and forced to have an abortion that results in her inability to conceive more children Sometimes I couldn’t follow the plot, which I found quite frustrating. But the beauty of the writing and the descriptions kept me reading. 

I was dismayed at the end when I found an Afterword by Goliarda’s husband, Angelo Pellegrino. The back of the book also contained a timeline of Goliarda’s life and pictures of Positano. I wish I had read them first. I believe if I had, I wouldn’t have had such a hard time following the book’s action.  Therefore, “Meeting in Positano” receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.