Books by and for independent women

Accabadora by Michela Murgia

Accabadora is Michela Murgia’s third novel, and the first – hopefully of many – to be translated into English (beautifully done by Silvester Mazzarella).

The winner of six major literary prizes in Murgia’s native Italy, Accabadora is a powerfully concise novel, tightly written and richly evocative.

Centring on elderly, mysterious Bonaria Urrai and her adopted daughter, Maria Listru, and set in a small Sardinian farming community, Accabodora has all the ingredients for a sweeping, meandering epic: a life-span story-arc, bordering on magic-realism and focusing on the births and deaths, loves and losses of an intense and remote community.

As a fan of the heft – both emotional and physical – of such tomes, I was initially a little suspicious of this relatively tiny book. But Murgia’s wonderfully controlled, lushly descriptive prose quickly brought me around (as did its actual compact packaging – lovely and square-ish and slim-ish, and meeting my elusive hardback-I-can-read-in-the-bath criteria).

Maria Listru is Bonaria Urrai’s adopted daughter: a fill’e anima, or ‘soul-child’, described in a great opening sentence as being a girl ‘conceived twice, from the poverty of one woman and the sterility of another’.

Maria is an embodiment of birth and life in the midst of infertility; Bonaria, on the other hand, is a bringer of death, an accabadora. Figures of Sardinian folktales, accabadoras are women who usher the dying into death, killing the terminally ill as an act of mercy. Bonaria describes her role as a kind of end-of-life mid-wife, and indeed death and birth are wonderfully interwoven throughout the story.

Maria has a happy life, secure in the knowledge that she is loved above all else by her adopted mother, and seemingly the only person in town who doesn’t know the meaning of Bonaria’s sudden excursions in the middle of the night.

But when Bonaria breaks her own strict rules in a moment of empathy and guilt, Maria is horrified to discover that her beloved second mother is a killer, and their life together is shattered. Maria travels to the mainland to find a life on her own, before tragedy draws her back.

Accabadora is a beautifully written reflection on birth and death – literal and otherwise – and the impact on people caught in-between. Every sentence is vividly, tangibly sensuous: evoking the feel of scorching Sardinian sun, the smell of the grapes ‘about to turn to must’, the bitter-sweet taste of almond paste, and the sound of women wailing theatrically at funerals.

Deeply touching but refreshingly unsentimental, I’ve already started dipping in to re-read my favourite parts. Highly recommended. Published last month by MacLehose Press, Accabadora is available in hardback for £6.60, or for Kindle for £6.27.

Rating: 4/5

Recommended for: Anyone looking for a quick and poignant read, or hoping to escape dreary December for a sunny (albeit unreal and vaguely creepy) Sardinia.

Other recommended reading: Both Gilead and Home by Marilynne Robinson, for differing but complementary and equally beautiful stories about ageing and death, and the responsibilities of those left behind.

Amanda O’Boyle