The Art of Joy, by Goliarda Sapienza
Published by Einaudi
The Art of Joy is a novel unlike anything Italian literature had ever dared before — and in some ways, even after. It is an act of moral insubordination, an explosion of mind and body, a journey into the consciousness of a woman who refuses destiny and reinvents it as an art form. Reading it, one feels that Goliarda Sapienza did not write merely a story, but a theory of freedom, embodied in the voice of Modesta, the protagonist born in 1900, daughter of poverty and sin, yet determined to become mistress of herself, of her desire, of her thought.
Goliarda Sapienza — actress, writer, partisan, daughter of two socialist intellectuals, self-taught and anarchic at heart — wrote The Art of Joy during the 1960s and 70s, but no publisher wanted it. Too long, too sensual, too free. Too feminine, in the most feared sense of the word: not consoling, not devout, not modest. It was rediscovered and published only after her death, in 1998, almost by chance, and it was the French edition in 2005 that finally revealed it to the world as the masterpiece it is. A novel that today stands as an archetype of the literature of freedom, yet was rejected for decades in its own country.
At the centre of the novel stands Modesta, daughter of a desperately poor woman and a brutal father. Her destiny seems already written, but she rewrites it with the force of her mind and her desire. After a childhood marked by violence and guilt, she is taken in by a convent, where she discovers two things at once: language and the body. There she meets Sister Beatrice, and that forbidden love reveals a truth that will accompany the entire novel: The body is a serious thing, not a sin.
Sapienza projects a figure who is not “feminist” in the ideological sense, but philosophical in the most radical one: a human being searching for the truth of her own nature, beyond good and evil, like Nietzsche. Modesta is neither good nor evil — she is alive. And within this concept lies the entire revolution of the novel: the claim of life as a field of experimentation, not of obedience.
Sapienza’s writing is at once carnal and crystalline. There is no thought that is not rooted in the body, and no desire that does not transform into knowledge. Modesta moves through the twentieth century like a comet: orphan, nun, aristocrat, lover, mother, intellectual, conspirator. Every role she wears and tears apart, like a garment that serves only as long as it allows her to breathe. The body becomes the only instrument of knowledge, and the novel itself a phenomenology of the female body — thinking, desiring, choosing, erring, but never asking for forgiveness.
Even today, there is something scandalous in the serenity with which Modesta assumes power — not as domination over others, but as fullness of self. She becomes an aristocrat in order not to be a slave, loves men and women without guilt, raises children without self-annihilation. And the joy spoken of in the title is not the euphoria of pleasure, but a tragic, lucid, conscious joy: the joy of one who has looked into guilt, into pain, and has decided to continue living. Joy is the hardest of conquests, because it demands courage, not innocence.
To read The Art of Joy today means confronting the repressed side of our culture: the one that fears complexity, contradiction, sensuality as a form of thought. Sapienza does not write to teach, but to break a centuries-old spell: the one that ties feminine virtue to renunciation. In her language, poetry merges with popular speech, philosophy with dialect.
And perhaps this is why Goliarda Sapienza must now be considered a cornerstone of twentieth-century Italian literature: her voice, like all voices too great, has only become fully audible in the future. Her novel does not simply tell the story of a woman, but the birth of a new consciousness, capable of embracing both shadow and light without separating them.
The Art of Joy is one of the few Italian works that cannot be summarised, only internalised. Like a ritual. Like a confession without a priest. It is a declaration of independence: I do not want to be happy, I want to be free.
Over the years, Modesta sees those she loves die, changes her mind, makes mistakes, is reborn. She grows old, but does not repent. Her true legacy is not wealth or power, but a way of being in the world: One must have the courage of one’s own joy.
In this sense, The Art of Joy goes beyond feminism, although it anticipated it. It is a novel of free thought, of the independence of body and mind, of the cost of consciousness. Sapienza writes like a philosopher disguised as a novelist, as if every page were a fragment of a possible ethics.
The Art of Joy remains one of the most powerful novels of twentieth-century Italy, a text that lays bare the question every human being avoids asking: how free can we be without ceasing to love? In Modesta, Sapienza answers: as long as we have the courage to look at our shadow and call it, without fear, joy.
Manuela Rispoli