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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter

Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter

Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter tells the story of four generations of a peasant family living outside Turin between the late nineteenth century and the boom years of the 1950s, as they clamber out of grinding rural poverty into the sixties world of frozen fish and fridges. The author’s grandmother emigrates to California and returns to Italy semi-paralysed after a mishap as she is giving birth.

When her father dies the author’s eight-year-old mother returns to Italy, to be brought up by a family she does not know, to become Italian again and ultimately to marry a captivating ‘man-boy’ whose fecklessness is grippingly described, as is his time in a German prison camp in World War 11. She runs a small shop which gradually expands, lifting the family out of the working class; her daughter, Margherita, always a conscientious student, reared by this extended matriarchal family, becomes the writer of this book.

Author

Margherita Giacobino

Margherita Giacobino

Books

Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter

Margherita Giacobino, born in 1952, lives in Turin. She is a writer, journalist and translator. She has translated many works by renowned authors, including Emily Bronte, Gustave Flaubert, Margaret Atwood, Dorothy Allison, and Audre Lorde.

Her debut novel Un’ Americana a Parigi was written under the pseudonym of Elinor Rigby and published in 1993. She is also the author of Casalinghe All’Inferno (1996), L’Educazione Sentimentale Di C.B. (2007) and L’Uovo Fuori Dal Cavagno (2010).

Her most recent work, The Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter, was first published in Italy in 2015 and has already been translated into French and German. It is the first novel by Margherita Giacobino to be translated into English

Translator

Judith Landry

Judith Landry

Books

The Last of the Vostyachs

The Mussolini Canal

Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter

Judith Landry was educated at Somerville College, Oxford where she obtained a first class honours degree in French and Italian. Her translated titles include The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga, The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte,The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague by Sylvie Germain and Smarra & Trilby by Charles Nodier.  She combines a career as a translator of works of fiction, art and architecture with part-time teaching.

Published by

Dedalus Limited, 2017
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Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter tells the story of four generations of a peasant family living outside Turin between the late nineteenth century and the boom years of the 1950s, as they clamber out of grinding rural poverty into the sixties world of frozen fish and fridges. The author’s grandmother emigrates to California and returns to Italy semi-paralysed after a mishap as she is giving birth.

When her father dies the author’s eight-year-old mother returns to Italy, to be brought up by a family she does not know, to become Italian again and ultimately to marry a captivating ‘man-boy’ whose fecklessness is grippingly described, as is his time in a German prison camp in World War 11. She runs a small shop which gradually expands, lifting the family out of the working class; her daughter, Margherita, always a conscientious student, reared by this extended matriarchal family, becomes the writer of this book.

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