By Patrizia Riello Pera, Padua, Italy
The Campiello 2018 prize was awarded to Rosella Postorino for Le assaggiatrici (At the Wolf’s Table), a novel of great narrative and historical power, capable of illuminating Nazism from a lateral, female, and disturbing perspective, far from the battlefields and yet immersed in the most intimate heart of fear. Postorino chooses to tell History through the body of a woman, Rosa Sauer, forced together with others to eat each day the food intended for Hitler in order to test whether it has been poisoned: a daily, apparently domestic gesture is thus transformed into a sentence, a ritual of survival, a form of imprisonment without bars.
Campiello 2018: totalitarian violence at the table
The greatness of the novel lies in its ability to show how totalitarian violence does not operate only through weapons, orders, and persecution, but also through hunger, the control of the smallest gestures, embodied fear, and the ambiguity of dependence on what could kill. In Le assaggiatrici, food loses all innocence: it nourishes and threatens, saves and humiliates, becomes an instrument of power and a daily test of vulnerability. The protagonist is not constructed as a heroic figure, but as a contradictory creature, crossed by desire, shame, the instinct for self-preservation, loneliness, and the need to remain alive in a world that has deformed every moral choice.
Postorino writes in a taut, sensory, precise language, capable of combining psychological tension and historical reconstruction without weighing down the page. The novel questions individual responsibility within a system that reduces people to functions, bodies, instruments, and expendable presences. War remains in the background, but its shadow invades every room, every mouthful, every relationship among the women, creating an atmosphere of suspicion, imperfect solidarity, and shared fear. With this recognition, the Campiello Prize honoured an incisive and fully contemporary voice, capable of transforming an almost forgotten story into a powerful reflection on survival, guilt, the female body, and the fragile freedom of the human being when History claims the right to decide even what one must ingest.
Read also the full list of Campiello Prize winners (in Italian). More reviews by Patrizia Riello Pera at patriziarielloperalibri.it.
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