Lettere dal convento. Rita, Gertrude e le altre

[Machine translation] With Letters from a Novice, published at Bompiano in 1941, Guido Piovene recovers and at the same time subverts structures, models and mice of the epistolary genre: on the one hand, it is linked to the trend of novels focused on letters sent from the convent (the Lettres Portugaises, Diderot's La Religieuse, Story of a black capinera di Verga), but the sincere, naive and passionate voices of those nuns he replaces the mendacious and cunning of his protagonist, the novice Margherita Passi, a master in the art of lying, reticence and manipulation. In the background, the Manzoni model of Gertrude's story, with its reflection on the dangers of verbal language, of the written word and especially of the epistolary word, a vehicle not of truth but of lies, an instrument not of confession but of falsification, a means by which men do not communicate but deceive each other, a weapon in the hands of the powerful who use it to overwhelm the weakest.