Medusa: The Fourth Kingdom

By turns a prose poem and a mythography, a tale of difficult modern love affairs and a work of experimental metafiction, Minghelli's meditation on the Medusa legend (the first volume in City Lights' Italian Voices series) combines formal innovation with lyrical insights into women's psychology. Setting her characters in contemporary Rome, Minghelli forgoes plot in favor of microscopic dissections of a young Italian woman's internal conflicts, which center on a troubled affair with an emotionally distant, patronizing lover. While the emotional pitch remains intense throughout, Minghelli alternates first-person diary entries (indebted, her afterword explains, to Julio Cort zar's Hopscotch) with third-person narration. Contemporary events are interwoven with poetic accounts of Medusa's girlhood, reinterpreting the snake-covered head that has come to symbolize the dangers of the feminine nature: ""From the depths of the blue ocean Medusa sees the six wise ones and the discordant music stirs her to the core. Her mind now changed, she is about to see."" Like Medusa, Minghelli's present-day heroine faces bittersweet anguish and transformation. Like her mythic counterpart, she journeys from innocence to her own earthly reality of multiple abortions, repressed anger and isolation. This short novel recalls, by turns, Cort zar and the early Jeanette Winterson, and might please fans of either. In one sense, it's a heady, often abstract attempt to link psychological observation, literary theory and myth; on another, it's the tale of a woman who keeps picking the wrong man. (July)