Aracoeli: A Novel

Front Cover
Random House, 1984 - Fiction - 311 pages
An aging man attempts to recover the past and get his life back on track in the process. His deceased mother, Aracoeli, came from a small Spanish town and married an upper class Italian navy ensign. The idyllic years she spends with her only son, Mauel, are shattered when she contracts an incurable disease and becomes a nymphomaniac. Now 43, Manuel is a unattractive, self-loathing, recovering drug addict who works in a dead end job at a small publishing house. He decides to travel back to Spain to search for traces of his mother.

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Contents

Section 1
6
Section 2
7
Section 3
10
Copyright

29 other sections not shown

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About the author (1984)

Prolific and highly successful, Elsa Morante distinguished herself as a novelist, short story writer, and poet. The Marxist critic Gyorgy Lukacs hailed Morante's early House of the Liars (1948) as "the greatest modern Italian novel," but it was Arthur's Island (1957) that brought her international fame and an independent income. Her great financial triumph was, however, History (1974), which was the first Italian novel to be marketed with high-pressure promotional advertising, making use of publisher, mass media, and political party resources to push sales up to 600,000 copies in less than six months. Morante married Alberto Moravia in 1941, and they separated in 1962.

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