Sabrina Zuccato is not exactly a newcomer, but Nagyrév’s midwifepublished by Marsilio, is certainly the novel that allows her to wear the debutante’s dress on the national editorial stage, which it is easy to imagine will see her as a protagonist in the future too. His is a semi-first work, which certifies a careful study of the sources and the ability to scrupulously confuse real events and fiction, without distorting the historical truth. All within a narrative frame that already denotes a marked maturity. From today, Tuesday 14 January, it is available in bookstores.

Noir fresco with gothic reflections

Zuccato embraces episodes of ruthless violence, in a noir fresco with barely hinted Gothic reflections, and handles delicate themes, such as patriarchy, with a reversal of roles – women take revenge and kill men – which has widely documented roots in the Hungary of a hundred years ago. The story originates from the discovery of the body of an elderly peasant woman near “a kind of bend” drawn by the Tisza, a river that crosses Nagyrév, a Hungarian community in the county of Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok. The captain of the county gendarmerie Zsigmond Danielovitz, a veteran of the Great War, still tormented by memories of the front, is called to investigate the case. Although he is used to dedicating his days to managing paperwork, it takes him little time to glimpse something sinister behind the eyes of the community’s inhabitants.

Danielovitz realizes that the woman’s death is not accidental, and the findings of the pathologists confirm his suspicions. The death of the old woman is only the link in a long chain of deaths recorded in the previous ten years, quickly attributed to cholera. What guides the gendarme in his investigations is a mysterious anonymous note addressed to him.

“Nagyrév’s graves have remained silent for more than a decade, but now they will finally speak, revealing their horrible secrets, and the victims will take revenge on the killers.”

Superstition hovers with arrogance over a community forced to live a daily life of violence, poverty and abuse. Within these borders, the inhabitants live in ignorance, immersed in popular beliefs, and unite in fueling prejudices against women. Thus Mary is “the woman of a hundred stallions”; Anna is “the filthy one”; Zsuzsanna, however, “the witch”. It is Zsuzsanna, the midwife who gives the novel its title, a healer, who has a key role in the whole story. But what is his responsibility within the community? Why does everyone fear her, but can’t do without her services, not least as a midwife? The writer investigates her past (between truth and fiction), gives depth to the character, shaping her as a sort of anti-heroine, both disturbing and seductive.

Nagyrév’s midwife it is a full-bodied novel of over four hundred pages, with a large final appendix that explains the methods of investigation and documentation (including on the territory) and highlights the ‘novelistic licenses’. Despite the length, it is the work’s merit that it has no dead points, no useless digressions to lengthen the narrative flow: everything that has been published is useful for the reader’s involvement. The dialogues are plausible and never banal, the alternation of temporal planes between the narrative present (1929) and the previous decades is careful. For the more sentimental, there is also room to shed a few tears. And finally the characters – primary and secondary, the protagonists and those who within the story want to rise to the absolute protagonist – are excellently characterized: chiseled in the physical descriptions and even more so in those feelings of hatred and revenge that snaked silently through the Hungarian county of horse of the world wars.

The author