From the Periphery: The Family Novels of Lilli Gruber and Simonetta Agnello Hornby

Recent criticism on the nature and history of the family novel has refined our understanding of this genre and of its persistence to the present day. Two recent examples of this sort of writing are the trilogies by the contemporary writers Lilli Gruber and Simonetta Agnello Hornby. Although these works treat what is roughly the same chronological period, they are set at different ends of the Italian peninsula, Gruber’s in the Tyrol region and Agnello Hornby’s in Sicily. While there are other important differences between the two works, both describe failures of once dominant patriarchal families whose demises are not lamented but simply chronicled from a new and more cosmopolitan perspective shared by both the novels’ characters and by their authors – a posture perhaps typical of many writers and thinkers in the new millennium.