Ursule Molinaro, Positions with White Roses, McPherson, 1989.
"After a self-imposed 12-year exile in Europe, a young woman finally returns home to visit her twin sister and parents. It is the holidays, but this homecoming goes awry from the start. For years the elderly parents have hardly spoken to each other, and the sister, Laura, who always before has come home at this time of year, is inexplicably absent. And yet, as parents and the visiting daughter assume their positions around the Christmas dinner table and its centerpiece of white roses, Laura's absence is transformed into a palpably overwhelming presence. Thus, the stage is set for an explosive confrontation as the family's story unfolds in what Marianne Hauser has called "a superb achievement, highly readable, profound and unrivaled."
"A world of conflicting emotions is packed into the book - a slim novel as novels go... Yet as we reach the end, we are enriched and dazzled, as if we had been whisked through a cosmic adventure." - American Book Review
Ursule Molinaro, Thirteen: Stories, Mcpherson, 1989.
"In an advance assessment of this collection of short stories, novelist Joseph McElroy remarked: "As erotic in their energy as they are poignantly unpredictable, these fictions challenge us to be as brave and free as any reincarnation we might imagine. They are mirrors and windows, reflecting a lifetime of dazzling invention." Ursule Molinaro has written more than 200 stories which have appeared in scores of journals, including Evergreen Review, Denver Quarterly, New American Review, Bennington Review, Best American Short Stories and TriQuarterly. The stories collected here represent some of her most exceptional pieces from the past 20 years: An unhappily married woman compulsively eavesdrops on her neighbor's daily trysts; a filmmaker photographs the brutal attack of her psychotic lover; a disincarnated spirit witnesses the charity sale of her worldly possessions; a rebellious slave is given his freedom--and a rebellious slave of his own; a sanguine young career woman ends her Hawaiian holiday in a violent collision with the local culture. These are 13 tales of intensely private worlds where the bizarre is a quietly insistent force - "an unbalanced, violent world," writes Kirkus Reviews, "where the distance between people is always too wide for them to cross."
"A doctor sets up a suicide parlor where people "could go to die in peace, painlessly . . . 24 hours a day, 7 days a week"; a 19th century housewife kills herself after she has failed to store sufficient provisions for a protracted winter, and, in a note, exhorts her family to eat her corpse. A recently divorced woman entertains her former spouse's nephew in the nude--unwittingly; another woman ruminates on a relationship she enjoyed at age 32 with a 17-year-old; a third confesses, "They've arrested me for eating the baby." Similarly morbid or perverse concerns preoccupy the other protagonists in these short stories. Molinaro ( Positions with White Roses ) observes her characters with unusual acuity. Her experimental style, however, encompasses distracting, eventually grating mannerisms, such as idiosyncratic punctuation and frequent amputation of subjects from sentences: "He makes a cult of cats. & quotes a famous painter whose name he can't remember. Who said that ..." - Publishers Weekly
"I've been sleeping widt my great-grandmother's left thigh bone under my pillow since my seventeenth birthday..." is the way "Shadowplay on Snow" begins, one of thirteen stories that represent the best of Molinaro's short fiction over twenty years. A witty dismembering of her personal history narrated in sentence fragments. That may. Or may not. Drive a reader to distraction. In Molinaro's world, the bizarre is commonplace. We meet Mrs. Feathergill, an unhappy housewife whose daily .,soap" is watching her neighbor's trysts; psychiatrist Arnold Biedermeir who imagines he's becoming ear-shaped after listening to hundreds of patients' woes; a sixteenth-century tavemowner's wife who falls in love with a pale-eyed executioner who is, in fact, female; a disembodied spirit who witnesses the charity sale of her worldly possessions; and a young career woman, murdered on the first night of her Hawaiian holiday. A violent eroticism propels Molinaro's most memorable characters. A young thug the narrator rescues in "AC-DC" offers himself to her after shooting her upstairs neighbor. He then disappears to offer equal-opporamity favors to the victim's wife. At least half of the stories in Thirteen are gems, spiked with surprise endings and as brilliantly inventive as they are unpredictable. But the wit that mesmerizes a reader of Molinaro's short fiction is absent in Positions with White Roses, her autobiographical novel about a prodigal daughter's return. The scene is Christmas dinner at her parents' home in the Napa Valley, where the centerpiece is the family's traditional "silver bowl with fresh white roses." A longing to break the oppressive silence that surrounds her parents' strained marriage prompts the daughter to recall her sexual past, not the least of which is her relationship to a twin. Her hunchbacked sister, Laura, aroused local males by her beauty, but it was the less striking sister they tumbled in the bushes. There are hints in this novel of the grace that connected sexual Ereedom with authenticity in Molinaro's shorter work, but here the narrative is freighted with historical parallels, lectures, and intellectual asides. Such abstractions defuse the story-line's erotic energy." - Independent Publisher
"Molinaro’s stories hex and delight us. And make us shiver." - Review of Contemporary Fiction
"The frame of reference in many of the stories in Ursule Molinaro's 13 is the normal, everyday, middle-class world.. The only thing is, most of her characters live at the very edge of the frame, where the slightest wrong move can tip them out of the picture altogether. Off into some high-literary Twilight Zone that, these stories suggest, lies waiting just the slightest gesture away. ... There's a wry gallows humor here that can be pretty wicked."- City Paper
"Sexual tension - the confused, hungry, stoppered-up sexual drives of solitary middle-aged women - is a recurring motif in Thirteen, turning [Molinaro's] women into late-summer strangers unto themselves." - New York Press and Baltimore's City Paper
"It is rare indeed to come upon a book which provides grand entertainment while we learn how to re-evaluate human mores from cannibalism to virtue, from sex to death."- Marianne Hauser
Ursule Molinaro, The New Moon With the Old Moon in Her Arms: A True Story Assembled from Scholarly Hearsay, McPherson, 1993.
"In a yearly ritual the citizens of ancient Athens chased a couple in wedding regalia through the streets under a hail of stones, to shouts of "Out with sickness and famine! In with health and wealth!" The broken bodies were left to decompose outside the city gates. Normally the victims would come from among society's downtrodden or outcasts, and exchange their lives for a year of luxury at the city's expense. But in defiance of tradition, and as an expression of protest, a poet from an aristocratic family volunteers her flawless 30-year-old body. This is her story."
"In a learned, readable style, Molinaro makes up a feminist fiction that...is finally human and moving. ...[A] historical fiction, written in a postmodernist fragmented style (which mostly works), about a woman who's full of 'causes that concerned me only as fillers for my audienceless, loveless life' and who comes finally to a tragic maturity." - Kirkus Reviews
"Molinaro's clever feminist novella is actually more like an extended (perhaps even a little attenuated) anecdote, set in ancient Athens. The female narrator is a nameless 30-year-old poet who has volunteered to be sacrificed by stoning on the feast day of Thargelia in order to expiate the sins and cure the illnesses of the city's inhabitants. Since the sacrificial "bride" is highly visible for a year before her death, our heroine sees the self-sacrifice as striking a blow for women's rights in an increasingly patriarchal Athens. However, her plans for death are upset when she becomes involved with a young girl and her sponge-diver father. Molinaro alternates passages from the poet's diary with lengthy disquisitions on Greek culture, from moon worship to medicine, revealing repeatedly how the female aspects of that culture have dropped from our view. These veritable footnotes lend the diary a historical context that in turn gives considerable resonance to the book's surprisingly downbeat ending. Molinaro shifts from a wry, bemused tone to one of melancholy, suggesting the irreconcilable nature of the male/female conflict that is at the center of the story and of the history that Molinaro recounts." - Publishers Weekly
"A nameless poet narrates this account of her year in waiting as a Thargelia bride in ancient Greece. According to the custom, a ritual bride and groom are stoned to death by their fellow Athenians as they slowly make their way through the city streets. The stones are meant to symbolize specific sins and diseases that the citizens wish to be rid of. In a world that has become male-dominated and militaristic, the poet, who is the beautiful daughter of a respected philosopher, decides (under the influence of Circe, the moon goddess) to sacrifice herself in order to call attention to discrimination against women in general and educated, working women in particular. With interesting digressions on topics ranging from the lunar calendar to men's fashion to natural medicine, this suspenseful narrative deserves a place in women's fiction collections." - Barbara Love
Ursule Molinaro, Fat Skeletons, Serif, 1994.
"Novelist/translator Molinaro's (The New Moon with the Old Moon in Her Arms) latest novel is a suspense fantasy of romance, betrayal and plagiarism, set both in contemporary Greenwich Village and a bygone Prague. Her vivid, disaffected protagonist-a 42-year-old Czech-born translator-wastes no time in flaunting ample evidence of her translating abilities, her command of New York grit or her European sophistication. Yet Mara's authorly gifts remain stifled, smothered by an oppressive childhood and haunted by a first love destroyed by crass deception. Her projected novella chronicling past lovers (mostly disappointing) remains blocked, until the slothful and penniless writer Mandy Murdoch comes begging a last-minute translation. Here, the cascade of Calvino-esque signs begins, as Molinaro delightedly layers dark remnants torn from Mara's past with an almost slapstick present. It is obviously a great deal of witty fun-if the reader identifies with Mara's searing brilliance, a brilliance that eclipses all the other terribly mundane folks. Less obvious, however, is the absurdist, sly, cynical Eastern European humor. And while the self-consciously hipsterized, fairy-tale ending might suit Hollywood, it seems incongruent here." - Publishers Weekly
Ursule Molinaro, Demons & Divas: Three Novels, McPherson, 2000.
"For this trilogy of short novels--her first new book in six years--Ursule Molinaro drew upon a wealth of sources (including Balzac, Flaubert, and Hildegard of Bingen) to transform the grotesqueries of our time into timeless tales.
Angel on Fire presents Clara Corvo, who was born with three peculiarities--a cloven hoof, phenomenal intelligence, and clairvoyance. Her mother finds her unbearable, and to escape her family takes a young student as a lover. When six-year-old Clara matriculates at Harvard Law School, an almost classical conclusion is inevitable.
In twenty letters gathered for the pending canonization of Jacob Erskine Wooster, a picture emerges not of humility but of large contraditions in an ordinary man whose beatification is as strange as his life. Saint Boy is Diane Arbus in prose.
In April in Paris, Molinaro spins Southern gothic into French embroidery. An American woman out of her element wherever she happens to be."
"This compact & carefully constructed trilogy of short novels - Angel on Fire, Saint Boy and April in Paris - focuses on seemingly ordinary characters, viewing them through a screen of mythological and biblical symbols and endowing them with double identities. In Angel on Fire, the Corvo family's balance is disrupted by the arrival of a seventh child and first daughter, Clara, born with a hoof in the place of one foot but also with precocious intelligence and prescience. From the moment of her birth, Clara is an emotional lightning rod. By age five, she has inspired worship and devotion in her father, brothers and her kindergarten classmates, but also jealousy and frustrated rage in women, including her own mother. In Saint Boy, Molinaro continues to question what makes a person worthy of admiration, or in the extreme case she documents, what makes a saint. Reading through a dramatic and passionate series of letters from those who knew (or didn't know) him, the hagiographers of the beatified (but not yet canonized) Jacob Erskine Wooster must reconstruct the life of this so-called "everyday saint." In April in Paris, April Mentone n?e Winslow presents her recollections of her expatriate life in Europe, but April's tenuous grasp on reality gives her a confused memory of her American past. Transporting her characters from Sicily to New York to Athens, from Sioux Falls to Los Angeles to Greece, and from Richmond to Vienna to Paris, Molinaro communicates a sense of displacement and manages to cover vast stretches of time and space. Translator, playwright, and author of 13 novels (Fat Skeleton, etc.), Molinaro reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary, injecting elements of the fantastic into her curious modern fables." - Publishers Weekly
"What good fortune to have three new novels, as exquisitely unruly as ever, from our grande dame of innovative fiction. Ursule Molinaro, wonderfully undiminished in her powers after four decades, has given us one thoroughly modern mother as willful as Clytemnestra, one unpleasant old Southern belle off on her geriatric adventures, and a cunning update of the epistolary form, all in one handy volume I think of as The Portable, Indispensable Molinaro." - Jaimy Gordon
"These stinging comedies of manners go right to the root of contemporary hypocrisy. Molinaro's gaze is unflinching, yet hyperaesthetic. Her kaleidoscopic prose and wry humor make for rich, effortless reading." - Bruce Benderson
"Ursule Molinaro's new book is a suite of three sharply satirical novellas, and the title appropriately describes all three protagonists, whose actions range from the diabolical to the operatic. The first novella, "Angel on Fire," is about Clara, an extraordinary 5-year-old with a full measure of demonic qualities, most notably a cloven hoof and an unforgivably precocious intellect. Her mother is unable to love her; not knowing what else to do, she sends her little daughter off to Harvard, where Clara immediately starts working on her doctoral disseration. In "Saint Boy," twin sister journalists appeal to the public for supporting letters in their campaign to win sainthood for an obscure artist named Jacob Erskine Wooster, who is said to have attended their school in California. The final novella, "April in Paris," follows the tragic footsteps of a woman named April who returns to her native Virginia after 50 years in Paris. April isn't sure how to live in a country that has changed so radically in her absence; in her view, gentility has turned into bigotry. Molinaro has a fine instinct for the grotesque, and a talent for providing laughter in the midst of tears; we are told, for example, that Wooster regularly whipped his daughter, not out of sadism but because "they had lost all other means of communication." - William Ferguson
"In Demons and Divas, Ursule Molinaro invites her readers to enter a strange, uncomfortable world, settles them down, and then promptly kicks them out. The first and most engaging story, "Angel on Fire," is a multi-layered read, incorporating mythology, gender roles, and a little girl who is much scarier than the "I see dead people" kid.... Molinaro ends the story in a grotesque and unexpected twist that leaves it readers both repulsed and craving more....The second story, "Saint Boy," takes the form of a hagiography (the writing or study of saints' lives) and consists of 20 letters from different people describing their relationships to a modern day (soon-to-be) saint from California whose questionable qualities are defended in a hilariously preposterous, yet always imaginative style....The final entry, "April in Paris,"...is offered amidst a level of dysfunction that rivals even the best of Woody Allen....Molinaro is like a fiery cocktail: two parts Greek mythology, one part religion, a dash of sex--pour over an ensemble of extraordinary characters and shake until your teeth are jarred. Drink immediately." - Eloise Campbell
"...I finally picked it up. I couldn't put it down. Each of its three short novels is a tour de force of style and strangeness. Humorously biting takes on our often blurry perceptions of good and evil, Molinaro's surreal, fabulistic tales unfold as perfectly synchronized jumbles of events and emotions, perceptions and misperceptions. She writes as if she were talking, yet she talks like a highly accomplished writer, revealing details in a precise, necessarily peculiar order. Her non sequiturs sequitur in spades to conjure powerfully sophisticated narratives." - The News & Observer
Ursule Molinaro, A Full Moon of Women, McPherson, 1993.
Subtitled "29 word portraits of notable women from different times and places, + 1 void of course," this book is a powerful, unsettling vision in the tradition of Anais Nin and Djuna Barnes of those heroines whose rebellious daring shaped the meaning of the feminine experience. In these miniature biographies of Charlotte Corday, Joan of Arc, Lucy Goodale Thurston, Clara Schumann, Simone Weil, Alice Neel, Zenobia, Mu-Lan Hwa, Adele Hugo, among many others, and naturally including Snow White, Molinaro's prose impacts with consistent force, resurrecting these forgotten or disparaged women in all their talent and suffering.
"'May you never have a child who's a saint,' Simone Weil's mother told her daughter's biographer in exasperation. Prodigies often fatigue the ordinary if well-meaning parent. Yet in the novelist and playwright Ursule Molinaro's spirited new collection...it's a sentiment echoed not just by parents but by spouses, lovers, and offspring of the notable women who are examined here: writers, warriors, schietists, artists, mystics, martyrs.... Molinaro is at her best when showing these women, warts and all -- the compromises of ambition, the hesitations of character. As in her longer fiction, Ms. Molinaro displays a poetic eye for detail in these short sketches." - New York Times Book Review
Ursule Molinaro, Power Dreamers: The Jocasta Complex, McPherson, 1995.
"Everyone knows the tragedy of Oedipus, from his answer to the Sphinx to his pitiable blind exile, from his intended death as an infant to his terror of oracles. But who knows of Jocasta -- the mother from whom he was torn, the wife to whom he was joined -- as anything other than a plaything of kings and gods? In this richly imagined novel, Ursule Molinaro brings Jocasta to the fore, allowing her to reclaim rightful significance as matrilineal Queen of Thebes, a dreamer of shared power. Ruler, mother, lover -- defiant of gods' wrath -- Jocasta becomes an intelligent and compassionate actor, as well as a courageous person helplessly caught in a conflict of totem and taboo. The voices of Jocasta and the sex-changing palace seer Tiresias, and the letters of Oedipus and Antigone, combine to tell of these thirty-seven years in the history of the seven-gated city: how, by marrying her son, Jocasta became the woman without whom Oedipus has no story."
"It's the flip side of the Oedipus Complex, what Freud might have made of the Greek tragedy had he been a woman and a novelist." - Kirkus Reviews
"This is a fascinating psychological portrait of a woman who refuses to believe she is but a puppet and who uses her intelligence and guile to try to win the chess game of the gods." - Library Journal
"Molinaro is one of those rare artists who can take on the myths and drama of antiquity, and spin them into something new without sacrificing their grandeur and humanity."- Elizabeth Hand
"Her works breathe a humane authenticity and emotional and political directness which is so simple and integral one wonders how these versions of the old stories have not been told before." - The Reader's Review
Ursule Molinaro, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy, McPherson, 1992.
"This novel tells the Homeric story of Troy from the perspective of the woman who was condemned not to be believed - the perfect spokesperson for a contemporary feminist novel. Written with Molinaro's typical flair for concision, Cassandra is second only to the classic Positions with White Roses as Molinaro's best novel. And Molinaro has been sensitive to readers whose knowledge of Greek mythology is imperfect (meaning: all of us) by providing a witty glossary of the mortals and gods who people this dramatic story of courage and sacrifice. (Note: This novel was originally published in hardcover in 1979, four years prior to the better-known and possibly derivative one on the same theme by Christa Wolf)."
"Molinaro's tender and subtly polemical reconstruction of the Iliad is a great book to read for its exploration of the themes that educated thousands of generations in the West, of women's role in every socieity, of mother/daughter legacies. Its irreverent take on the most famous war and its starkly moving female voices are closer to my heart than any in Homer..." - Euridice
"Cassandra begins her autobiography at that point near her life's end as she approaches the palace of Mycenae where Clytemnestra will murder both her and Agamemnon. Remembering, reliving, and researching her own life for over three thousand years as she repeatedly tells us, the narrator offers many fascinating, even entertaining revisions concerning the battle of Troy and its participants: Cassandra informs the reader that Penelope slept with every one of her quarreling suitors while waiting for the bowlegged, dwarflike Odysseus, and that among Achilles' sexual peculiarities cross-dressing stands out in her memory! In the process of telling her own tale Cassandra clarifies a number of what have become legendary relationships from a variety of angles: those of Helen and Paris, Polyxena and Achilles, Penthesileia and Achilles, Andromache and Hector, and Hecabe and Priam are the most prominent among them.
All of her elucidations and emendations revolve ultimately around women's position in Greek society as portrayed by Homer, "blind & lyrical," a position she consistently juxtaposes against the preceding matriarchal reign of the Great Mother, Gaia, when priestesses flourished and women held office. Reviewing her own life from a three-thousand-year-old perspective as she repeatedly confirms, she also compares Homeric society with our own.
The Autobiography of Cassandra first appeared in hardcover in 1979. There are amazing similarities between Molinaro's Cassandra and the Cassandra novel of the German writer Christa Wolf, which it predates by four years. Most striking is the identical setting at the opening of the novels before the palace gates. Molinaro, like Wolf, opts for a first-person narration. Choppy conversational prose that sometimes reads like the script of a telephone conversation, sarcastic, ironic, and always concise, is characteristic of Molinaro's Cassandra.
For the unseasoned adventurer into Homeric myth there is a glossary of "Mortals and Immortals" provided at the end of the volume. But even for the reader without much knowledge or interest in the old myths, Molinaro provides a diverse array of interpersonal relationships that too often touch a sensitive contemporary nerve in the network that encompasses men, women, and power." - Lynda Hoffman-Jeep
"An original and convincing theory of the hows and whys of the low status of women in Greek society, a paradoxical fact that has often puzzled students of a literature so rich in strong female roles... A book to be read for personal pleasure, for exploration of mother/daughter themes, and of potential use in women's studies courses." - Library Journal
"On 10 July 2000 the writer Ursule Molinaro passed away at her home in downtown Manhattan. She had been bedridden for about two weeks after a traumatic stay in hospital, against her will. Aside from numerous manuscripts, literary magazines, and published books--for which I have become the literary executor--she left little behind. The effects of Ursule Molinaro, including her archives, now total one ingeniously crammed storage space about the size of a small bathroom, maintained by her daughter Isabelle Molinaro, around the corner from her former apartment on East Second Street. Her age and place of birth are still shrouded in the mystery she imposed upon them. Her career as a prolific fiction writer, playwright, painter, and translator of French, German, and Italian is now relatively obscure, despite a prodigious output and a small band of enthusiastic colleagues, readers, creative-writing students, friends, and publisher Bruce McPherson--all of whose lives and crafts were irremediably influenced by her.
Like Nabokov, Molinaro was a European transplant to America who made the decision to put herself through the arduous process of learning to write in her new language. She came to the United States in 1946, probably around the age of thirty, from Paris, to work as a French language proofreader for the newly formed United Nations. At that time, she had published one book of poetry in French, called Rimes et raisons (1946). Due to a passion for language as well as an education in Germany, Italy, France, and England, she was already astonishingly multilingual, to the extent that she could speak the languages of all these countries fluently with no discernable accent. Another small book of prose with six illustrations by Leon Kelly, Petit manuel pour la circulation dans le neant, was published two years later.
Molinaro's literary roots were decidedly international and modernist, based on her rich education and her travels and her proficiency in languages. She admired Baudelaire, Goethe, Faulkner, Beckett, Giraudoux, Cocteau, and Tennessee Williams. She deeply disliked literature she felt was based on gossip, and for that reason was known to skewer with great contempt the work of Proust, who she thought was a deplorable stylist, badly in need of editing. She also was a deprecator of Anglo-Saxon naturalism, holding up Dickens as an example of the type of literal-minded writer one should not aspire to be. She was more likely to evince a passion for the decadent writer Huysmans, and she admired Lorca and D'Annunzio. Of course, she was able to read all of these writers in their original language.
At some point in the 1950s, presumably after Molinaro had made the switch from writing in French to writing in English, influential literary agent Georges Borchardt decided to represent her. This association would prove fruitful in the 1960s and early 1970s, when her novels would be published by Harper & Row and New American Library in the United States and Julliard and Grasset in French, but it would dry up by the late seventies, when Molinaro began to seem unmarketable to the Borchardt agency and began to receive less and less attention from them.
The first people to publish Molinaro in the States were Cecil Hemley of Noonday and Themistocles Hoetis, who was editor of Zero. One of the Molinaro stories from Cecil Hemley's magazine Prism, "The Insufficient Rope," would later be included in the 1963 anthology Best American Short Stories. Starting in 1958, Molinaro was co-founder and fiction editor of the Chelsea Review, which began to publish some of the most innovative and avant-garde work on the international scene, including hers. However, she gave up that editorship in 1965, partly because of increasingly negative relations with the magazine's moneyed benefactor and co-editor Sonia Raiziss, with whose young adopted son, Peter St. Mu, Molinaro had fallen deeply in love. By 1964, with the publication of her first novel, The Borrower, in a French translation of her original English version, she already had emerged as an important playwright on the off-off Broadway scene and a noted short-story writer. (1) This must have been the time when the fully formed persona of "Ursule Molinaro, American writer" emerged. This new persona was, in part, a miraculous disappearing act, an attempt to excise not only her voice as a French writer, but many of the painful memories of her European childhood and her incarceration during the German occupation of France. Although she rarely provided details about her upbringing, in the 1990s she did write a book-length text, still unpublished, which she playfully described as a memoir, although she never revealed how factual or imaginary it was. It describes an extremely alienated little girl, brought up by a widowed mother in a high-bourgeois or perhaps aristocratic, provincial European household of mostly unsympathetic adult relatives, including a sadistically hostile grandmother. Molinaro's later flight throughout France in an attempt to evade occupation authorities and her subsequent imprisonment during the occupation, presumably for hiding a Jewish couple in her home, are alluded to in several stories and plays, and they obviously became a devastating focus for her ideas about the cruelty of the human species and the tyranny of nationalism.
These traumatic events form in part the basis of her literary rebellion against family values, nationalistic hegemony, and the literary tradition of biography. Henceforth she would never associate herself with any family history or single ethnicity in her conversations. It was as if she had exiled all the disagreeable facts of her biography--especially those dealing with progeny and nation--to the realm of fiction, where, rather than repressing them, she was free to take a kind of revenge upon them--to rework them into satirical, philosophical, or political metaphors. Once Molinaro became established as an American writer, her origins and age--her entire past--would be a matter of speculation. The only clues to these were in her fiction. Few photos of her from the past or present ever appeared--she accused photography of stealing the surface while betraying the inner life--and interviewers often left frustrated in their attempts to draw the "story" of her life from her.
In her rebellion against the biographical tradition, as well as family and ethnic history, Ursule Molinaro eventually cast herself into a universe of one. Her obstinate honing of individuality would continue for four more decades of writing mostly fiction and plays. Her literary contacts would become less mainstream as time passed. Often working alone in a cultural vacuum, with little community support, Molinaro the ideologue and artist had only one strength upon which to rely--her prodigious literary craft. In a version of the Nietzschean superwoman, she had invented herself and her world. It was a world of social judgments and political values, but it has turned out to be no easy ally of that fusion of sociology and psychoanalysis we call new historicism or that blatant political activism in the world of literary scholarship that thinks of fiction as a minor platform. Molinaro's texts elude such analyses because they are obstinately and saliently eccentric. They are the crowning achievements of an individuality, loaded with her penchants, commonsense wisdom, multicultural tidbits, occult notions, and word play. Her character portrayals are always antipsychoanalytic (as was she), adhering more to pre-Freudian ideas of innate character, the interplay of humans and nature, existential choices, and even astrology than to formulas of early childhood experience.
Despite these eccentric characteristics, from the late 1970s, Molinaro's writing was often described as feminist. It is true that her fiction and plays show a pronounced concern with the injustices of social power. She is most at home when dealing with the mentalities or behavior of oppressed women as well as minority races, gays, and animals. Of course, such a perspective comes as no surprise. She grew up feeling oppressed in her own childhood home. In conversations with me she often expressed deep dissatisfaction with the roles available to women in her lifetime. She was, from a fairly early time in the twentieth century, an advocate of sexual freedom who enjoyed two husbands and affairs with several men and, most probably, some women. Although she had one daughter, she rejected the conventional role of motherhood, and her daughter spent most of her early years not with Molinaro but with Molinaro's mother. In her life, then, she resembled her characters: renegade women who insist upon libidinal freedom and authority. In addition, Molinaro's dissatisfaction with women's roles took blatant form in her novel … " - Bruce Benderson
"After a self-imposed 12-year exile in Europe, a young woman finally returns home to visit her twin sister and parents. It is the holidays, but this homecoming goes awry from the start. For years the elderly parents have hardly spoken to each other, and the sister, Laura, who always before has come home at this time of year, is inexplicably absent. And yet, as parents and the visiting daughter assume their positions around the Christmas dinner table and its centerpiece of white roses, Laura's absence is transformed into a palpably overwhelming presence. Thus, the stage is set for an explosive confrontation as the family's story unfolds in what Marianne Hauser has called "a superb achievement, highly readable, profound and unrivaled."
"A world of conflicting emotions is packed into the book - a slim novel as novels go... Yet as we reach the end, we are enriched and dazzled, as if we had been whisked through a cosmic adventure." - American Book Review
Ursule Molinaro, Thirteen: Stories, Mcpherson, 1989."In an advance assessment of this collection of short stories, novelist Joseph McElroy remarked: "As erotic in their energy as they are poignantly unpredictable, these fictions challenge us to be as brave and free as any reincarnation we might imagine. They are mirrors and windows, reflecting a lifetime of dazzling invention." Ursule Molinaro has written more than 200 stories which have appeared in scores of journals, including Evergreen Review, Denver Quarterly, New American Review, Bennington Review, Best American Short Stories and TriQuarterly. The stories collected here represent some of her most exceptional pieces from the past 20 years: An unhappily married woman compulsively eavesdrops on her neighbor's daily trysts; a filmmaker photographs the brutal attack of her psychotic lover; a disincarnated spirit witnesses the charity sale of her worldly possessions; a rebellious slave is given his freedom--and a rebellious slave of his own; a sanguine young career woman ends her Hawaiian holiday in a violent collision with the local culture. These are 13 tales of intensely private worlds where the bizarre is a quietly insistent force - "an unbalanced, violent world," writes Kirkus Reviews, "where the distance between people is always too wide for them to cross."
"A doctor sets up a suicide parlor where people "could go to die in peace, painlessly . . . 24 hours a day, 7 days a week"; a 19th century housewife kills herself after she has failed to store sufficient provisions for a protracted winter, and, in a note, exhorts her family to eat her corpse. A recently divorced woman entertains her former spouse's nephew in the nude--unwittingly; another woman ruminates on a relationship she enjoyed at age 32 with a 17-year-old; a third confesses, "They've arrested me for eating the baby." Similarly morbid or perverse concerns preoccupy the other protagonists in these short stories. Molinaro ( Positions with White Roses ) observes her characters with unusual acuity. Her experimental style, however, encompasses distracting, eventually grating mannerisms, such as idiosyncratic punctuation and frequent amputation of subjects from sentences: "He makes a cult of cats. & quotes a famous painter whose name he can't remember. Who said that ..." - Publishers Weekly
"I've been sleeping widt my great-grandmother's left thigh bone under my pillow since my seventeenth birthday..." is the way "Shadowplay on Snow" begins, one of thirteen stories that represent the best of Molinaro's short fiction over twenty years. A witty dismembering of her personal history narrated in sentence fragments. That may. Or may not. Drive a reader to distraction. In Molinaro's world, the bizarre is commonplace. We meet Mrs. Feathergill, an unhappy housewife whose daily .,soap" is watching her neighbor's trysts; psychiatrist Arnold Biedermeir who imagines he's becoming ear-shaped after listening to hundreds of patients' woes; a sixteenth-century tavemowner's wife who falls in love with a pale-eyed executioner who is, in fact, female; a disembodied spirit who witnesses the charity sale of her worldly possessions; and a young career woman, murdered on the first night of her Hawaiian holiday. A violent eroticism propels Molinaro's most memorable characters. A young thug the narrator rescues in "AC-DC" offers himself to her after shooting her upstairs neighbor. He then disappears to offer equal-opporamity favors to the victim's wife. At least half of the stories in Thirteen are gems, spiked with surprise endings and as brilliantly inventive as they are unpredictable. But the wit that mesmerizes a reader of Molinaro's short fiction is absent in Positions with White Roses, her autobiographical novel about a prodigal daughter's return. The scene is Christmas dinner at her parents' home in the Napa Valley, where the centerpiece is the family's traditional "silver bowl with fresh white roses." A longing to break the oppressive silence that surrounds her parents' strained marriage prompts the daughter to recall her sexual past, not the least of which is her relationship to a twin. Her hunchbacked sister, Laura, aroused local males by her beauty, but it was the less striking sister they tumbled in the bushes. There are hints in this novel of the grace that connected sexual Ereedom with authenticity in Molinaro's shorter work, but here the narrative is freighted with historical parallels, lectures, and intellectual asides. Such abstractions defuse the story-line's erotic energy." - Independent Publisher
"Molinaro’s stories hex and delight us. And make us shiver." - Review of Contemporary Fiction
"The frame of reference in many of the stories in Ursule Molinaro's 13 is the normal, everyday, middle-class world.. The only thing is, most of her characters live at the very edge of the frame, where the slightest wrong move can tip them out of the picture altogether. Off into some high-literary Twilight Zone that, these stories suggest, lies waiting just the slightest gesture away. ... There's a wry gallows humor here that can be pretty wicked."- City Paper
"Sexual tension - the confused, hungry, stoppered-up sexual drives of solitary middle-aged women - is a recurring motif in Thirteen, turning [Molinaro's] women into late-summer strangers unto themselves." - New York Press and Baltimore's City Paper
"It is rare indeed to come upon a book which provides grand entertainment while we learn how to re-evaluate human mores from cannibalism to virtue, from sex to death."- Marianne Hauser
Ursule Molinaro, The New Moon With the Old Moon in Her Arms: A True Story Assembled from Scholarly Hearsay, McPherson, 1993."In a yearly ritual the citizens of ancient Athens chased a couple in wedding regalia through the streets under a hail of stones, to shouts of "Out with sickness and famine! In with health and wealth!" The broken bodies were left to decompose outside the city gates. Normally the victims would come from among society's downtrodden or outcasts, and exchange their lives for a year of luxury at the city's expense. But in defiance of tradition, and as an expression of protest, a poet from an aristocratic family volunteers her flawless 30-year-old body. This is her story."
"In a learned, readable style, Molinaro makes up a feminist fiction that...is finally human and moving. ...[A] historical fiction, written in a postmodernist fragmented style (which mostly works), about a woman who's full of 'causes that concerned me only as fillers for my audienceless, loveless life' and who comes finally to a tragic maturity." - Kirkus Reviews
"Molinaro's clever feminist novella is actually more like an extended (perhaps even a little attenuated) anecdote, set in ancient Athens. The female narrator is a nameless 30-year-old poet who has volunteered to be sacrificed by stoning on the feast day of Thargelia in order to expiate the sins and cure the illnesses of the city's inhabitants. Since the sacrificial "bride" is highly visible for a year before her death, our heroine sees the self-sacrifice as striking a blow for women's rights in an increasingly patriarchal Athens. However, her plans for death are upset when she becomes involved with a young girl and her sponge-diver father. Molinaro alternates passages from the poet's diary with lengthy disquisitions on Greek culture, from moon worship to medicine, revealing repeatedly how the female aspects of that culture have dropped from our view. These veritable footnotes lend the diary a historical context that in turn gives considerable resonance to the book's surprisingly downbeat ending. Molinaro shifts from a wry, bemused tone to one of melancholy, suggesting the irreconcilable nature of the male/female conflict that is at the center of the story and of the history that Molinaro recounts." - Publishers Weekly
"A nameless poet narrates this account of her year in waiting as a Thargelia bride in ancient Greece. According to the custom, a ritual bride and groom are stoned to death by their fellow Athenians as they slowly make their way through the city streets. The stones are meant to symbolize specific sins and diseases that the citizens wish to be rid of. In a world that has become male-dominated and militaristic, the poet, who is the beautiful daughter of a respected philosopher, decides (under the influence of Circe, the moon goddess) to sacrifice herself in order to call attention to discrimination against women in general and educated, working women in particular. With interesting digressions on topics ranging from the lunar calendar to men's fashion to natural medicine, this suspenseful narrative deserves a place in women's fiction collections." - Barbara Love
Ursule Molinaro, Fat Skeletons, Serif, 1994."Novelist/translator Molinaro's (The New Moon with the Old Moon in Her Arms) latest novel is a suspense fantasy of romance, betrayal and plagiarism, set both in contemporary Greenwich Village and a bygone Prague. Her vivid, disaffected protagonist-a 42-year-old Czech-born translator-wastes no time in flaunting ample evidence of her translating abilities, her command of New York grit or her European sophistication. Yet Mara's authorly gifts remain stifled, smothered by an oppressive childhood and haunted by a first love destroyed by crass deception. Her projected novella chronicling past lovers (mostly disappointing) remains blocked, until the slothful and penniless writer Mandy Murdoch comes begging a last-minute translation. Here, the cascade of Calvino-esque signs begins, as Molinaro delightedly layers dark remnants torn from Mara's past with an almost slapstick present. It is obviously a great deal of witty fun-if the reader identifies with Mara's searing brilliance, a brilliance that eclipses all the other terribly mundane folks. Less obvious, however, is the absurdist, sly, cynical Eastern European humor. And while the self-consciously hipsterized, fairy-tale ending might suit Hollywood, it seems incongruent here." - Publishers Weekly
Ursule Molinaro, Demons & Divas: Three Novels, McPherson, 2000."For this trilogy of short novels--her first new book in six years--Ursule Molinaro drew upon a wealth of sources (including Balzac, Flaubert, and Hildegard of Bingen) to transform the grotesqueries of our time into timeless tales.
Angel on Fire presents Clara Corvo, who was born with three peculiarities--a cloven hoof, phenomenal intelligence, and clairvoyance. Her mother finds her unbearable, and to escape her family takes a young student as a lover. When six-year-old Clara matriculates at Harvard Law School, an almost classical conclusion is inevitable.
In twenty letters gathered for the pending canonization of Jacob Erskine Wooster, a picture emerges not of humility but of large contraditions in an ordinary man whose beatification is as strange as his life. Saint Boy is Diane Arbus in prose.
In April in Paris, Molinaro spins Southern gothic into French embroidery. An American woman out of her element wherever she happens to be."
"This compact & carefully constructed trilogy of short novels - Angel on Fire, Saint Boy and April in Paris - focuses on seemingly ordinary characters, viewing them through a screen of mythological and biblical symbols and endowing them with double identities. In Angel on Fire, the Corvo family's balance is disrupted by the arrival of a seventh child and first daughter, Clara, born with a hoof in the place of one foot but also with precocious intelligence and prescience. From the moment of her birth, Clara is an emotional lightning rod. By age five, she has inspired worship and devotion in her father, brothers and her kindergarten classmates, but also jealousy and frustrated rage in women, including her own mother. In Saint Boy, Molinaro continues to question what makes a person worthy of admiration, or in the extreme case she documents, what makes a saint. Reading through a dramatic and passionate series of letters from those who knew (or didn't know) him, the hagiographers of the beatified (but not yet canonized) Jacob Erskine Wooster must reconstruct the life of this so-called "everyday saint." In April in Paris, April Mentone n?e Winslow presents her recollections of her expatriate life in Europe, but April's tenuous grasp on reality gives her a confused memory of her American past. Transporting her characters from Sicily to New York to Athens, from Sioux Falls to Los Angeles to Greece, and from Richmond to Vienna to Paris, Molinaro communicates a sense of displacement and manages to cover vast stretches of time and space. Translator, playwright, and author of 13 novels (Fat Skeleton, etc.), Molinaro reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary, injecting elements of the fantastic into her curious modern fables." - Publishers Weekly
"What good fortune to have three new novels, as exquisitely unruly as ever, from our grande dame of innovative fiction. Ursule Molinaro, wonderfully undiminished in her powers after four decades, has given us one thoroughly modern mother as willful as Clytemnestra, one unpleasant old Southern belle off on her geriatric adventures, and a cunning update of the epistolary form, all in one handy volume I think of as The Portable, Indispensable Molinaro." - Jaimy Gordon
"These stinging comedies of manners go right to the root of contemporary hypocrisy. Molinaro's gaze is unflinching, yet hyperaesthetic. Her kaleidoscopic prose and wry humor make for rich, effortless reading." - Bruce Benderson
"Ursule Molinaro's new book is a suite of three sharply satirical novellas, and the title appropriately describes all three protagonists, whose actions range from the diabolical to the operatic. The first novella, "Angel on Fire," is about Clara, an extraordinary 5-year-old with a full measure of demonic qualities, most notably a cloven hoof and an unforgivably precocious intellect. Her mother is unable to love her; not knowing what else to do, she sends her little daughter off to Harvard, where Clara immediately starts working on her doctoral disseration. In "Saint Boy," twin sister journalists appeal to the public for supporting letters in their campaign to win sainthood for an obscure artist named Jacob Erskine Wooster, who is said to have attended their school in California. The final novella, "April in Paris," follows the tragic footsteps of a woman named April who returns to her native Virginia after 50 years in Paris. April isn't sure how to live in a country that has changed so radically in her absence; in her view, gentility has turned into bigotry. Molinaro has a fine instinct for the grotesque, and a talent for providing laughter in the midst of tears; we are told, for example, that Wooster regularly whipped his daughter, not out of sadism but because "they had lost all other means of communication." - William Ferguson
"In Demons and Divas, Ursule Molinaro invites her readers to enter a strange, uncomfortable world, settles them down, and then promptly kicks them out. The first and most engaging story, "Angel on Fire," is a multi-layered read, incorporating mythology, gender roles, and a little girl who is much scarier than the "I see dead people" kid.... Molinaro ends the story in a grotesque and unexpected twist that leaves it readers both repulsed and craving more....The second story, "Saint Boy," takes the form of a hagiography (the writing or study of saints' lives) and consists of 20 letters from different people describing their relationships to a modern day (soon-to-be) saint from California whose questionable qualities are defended in a hilariously preposterous, yet always imaginative style....The final entry, "April in Paris,"...is offered amidst a level of dysfunction that rivals even the best of Woody Allen....Molinaro is like a fiery cocktail: two parts Greek mythology, one part religion, a dash of sex--pour over an ensemble of extraordinary characters and shake until your teeth are jarred. Drink immediately." - Eloise Campbell
"...I finally picked it up. I couldn't put it down. Each of its three short novels is a tour de force of style and strangeness. Humorously biting takes on our often blurry perceptions of good and evil, Molinaro's surreal, fabulistic tales unfold as perfectly synchronized jumbles of events and emotions, perceptions and misperceptions. She writes as if she were talking, yet she talks like a highly accomplished writer, revealing details in a precise, necessarily peculiar order. Her non sequiturs sequitur in spades to conjure powerfully sophisticated narratives." - The News & Observer
Ursule Molinaro, A Full Moon of Women, McPherson, 1993.Subtitled "29 word portraits of notable women from different times and places, + 1 void of course," this book is a powerful, unsettling vision in the tradition of Anais Nin and Djuna Barnes of those heroines whose rebellious daring shaped the meaning of the feminine experience. In these miniature biographies of Charlotte Corday, Joan of Arc, Lucy Goodale Thurston, Clara Schumann, Simone Weil, Alice Neel, Zenobia, Mu-Lan Hwa, Adele Hugo, among many others, and naturally including Snow White, Molinaro's prose impacts with consistent force, resurrecting these forgotten or disparaged women in all their talent and suffering.
"'May you never have a child who's a saint,' Simone Weil's mother told her daughter's biographer in exasperation. Prodigies often fatigue the ordinary if well-meaning parent. Yet in the novelist and playwright Ursule Molinaro's spirited new collection...it's a sentiment echoed not just by parents but by spouses, lovers, and offspring of the notable women who are examined here: writers, warriors, schietists, artists, mystics, martyrs.... Molinaro is at her best when showing these women, warts and all -- the compromises of ambition, the hesitations of character. As in her longer fiction, Ms. Molinaro displays a poetic eye for detail in these short sketches." - New York Times Book Review
Ursule Molinaro, Power Dreamers: The Jocasta Complex, McPherson, 1995."Everyone knows the tragedy of Oedipus, from his answer to the Sphinx to his pitiable blind exile, from his intended death as an infant to his terror of oracles. But who knows of Jocasta -- the mother from whom he was torn, the wife to whom he was joined -- as anything other than a plaything of kings and gods? In this richly imagined novel, Ursule Molinaro brings Jocasta to the fore, allowing her to reclaim rightful significance as matrilineal Queen of Thebes, a dreamer of shared power. Ruler, mother, lover -- defiant of gods' wrath -- Jocasta becomes an intelligent and compassionate actor, as well as a courageous person helplessly caught in a conflict of totem and taboo. The voices of Jocasta and the sex-changing palace seer Tiresias, and the letters of Oedipus and Antigone, combine to tell of these thirty-seven years in the history of the seven-gated city: how, by marrying her son, Jocasta became the woman without whom Oedipus has no story."
"It's the flip side of the Oedipus Complex, what Freud might have made of the Greek tragedy had he been a woman and a novelist." - Kirkus Reviews
"This is a fascinating psychological portrait of a woman who refuses to believe she is but a puppet and who uses her intelligence and guile to try to win the chess game of the gods." - Library Journal
"Molinaro is one of those rare artists who can take on the myths and drama of antiquity, and spin them into something new without sacrificing their grandeur and humanity."- Elizabeth Hand
"Her works breathe a humane authenticity and emotional and political directness which is so simple and integral one wonders how these versions of the old stories have not been told before." - The Reader's Review
Ursule Molinaro, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy, McPherson, 1992."This novel tells the Homeric story of Troy from the perspective of the woman who was condemned not to be believed - the perfect spokesperson for a contemporary feminist novel. Written with Molinaro's typical flair for concision, Cassandra is second only to the classic Positions with White Roses as Molinaro's best novel. And Molinaro has been sensitive to readers whose knowledge of Greek mythology is imperfect (meaning: all of us) by providing a witty glossary of the mortals and gods who people this dramatic story of courage and sacrifice. (Note: This novel was originally published in hardcover in 1979, four years prior to the better-known and possibly derivative one on the same theme by Christa Wolf)."
"Molinaro's tender and subtly polemical reconstruction of the Iliad is a great book to read for its exploration of the themes that educated thousands of generations in the West, of women's role in every socieity, of mother/daughter legacies. Its irreverent take on the most famous war and its starkly moving female voices are closer to my heart than any in Homer..." - Euridice
"Cassandra begins her autobiography at that point near her life's end as she approaches the palace of Mycenae where Clytemnestra will murder both her and Agamemnon. Remembering, reliving, and researching her own life for over three thousand years as she repeatedly tells us, the narrator offers many fascinating, even entertaining revisions concerning the battle of Troy and its participants: Cassandra informs the reader that Penelope slept with every one of her quarreling suitors while waiting for the bowlegged, dwarflike Odysseus, and that among Achilles' sexual peculiarities cross-dressing stands out in her memory! In the process of telling her own tale Cassandra clarifies a number of what have become legendary relationships from a variety of angles: those of Helen and Paris, Polyxena and Achilles, Penthesileia and Achilles, Andromache and Hector, and Hecabe and Priam are the most prominent among them.
All of her elucidations and emendations revolve ultimately around women's position in Greek society as portrayed by Homer, "blind & lyrical," a position she consistently juxtaposes against the preceding matriarchal reign of the Great Mother, Gaia, when priestesses flourished and women held office. Reviewing her own life from a three-thousand-year-old perspective as she repeatedly confirms, she also compares Homeric society with our own.
The Autobiography of Cassandra first appeared in hardcover in 1979. There are amazing similarities between Molinaro's Cassandra and the Cassandra novel of the German writer Christa Wolf, which it predates by four years. Most striking is the identical setting at the opening of the novels before the palace gates. Molinaro, like Wolf, opts for a first-person narration. Choppy conversational prose that sometimes reads like the script of a telephone conversation, sarcastic, ironic, and always concise, is characteristic of Molinaro's Cassandra.
For the unseasoned adventurer into Homeric myth there is a glossary of "Mortals and Immortals" provided at the end of the volume. But even for the reader without much knowledge or interest in the old myths, Molinaro provides a diverse array of interpersonal relationships that too often touch a sensitive contemporary nerve in the network that encompasses men, women, and power." - Lynda Hoffman-Jeep
"An original and convincing theory of the hows and whys of the low status of women in Greek society, a paradoxical fact that has often puzzled students of a literature so rich in strong female roles... A book to be read for personal pleasure, for exploration of mother/daughter themes, and of potential use in women's studies courses." - Library Journal
"On 10 July 2000 the writer Ursule Molinaro passed away at her home in downtown Manhattan. She had been bedridden for about two weeks after a traumatic stay in hospital, against her will. Aside from numerous manuscripts, literary magazines, and published books--for which I have become the literary executor--she left little behind. The effects of Ursule Molinaro, including her archives, now total one ingeniously crammed storage space about the size of a small bathroom, maintained by her daughter Isabelle Molinaro, around the corner from her former apartment on East Second Street. Her age and place of birth are still shrouded in the mystery she imposed upon them. Her career as a prolific fiction writer, playwright, painter, and translator of French, German, and Italian is now relatively obscure, despite a prodigious output and a small band of enthusiastic colleagues, readers, creative-writing students, friends, and publisher Bruce McPherson--all of whose lives and crafts were irremediably influenced by her.Like Nabokov, Molinaro was a European transplant to America who made the decision to put herself through the arduous process of learning to write in her new language. She came to the United States in 1946, probably around the age of thirty, from Paris, to work as a French language proofreader for the newly formed United Nations. At that time, she had published one book of poetry in French, called Rimes et raisons (1946). Due to a passion for language as well as an education in Germany, Italy, France, and England, she was already astonishingly multilingual, to the extent that she could speak the languages of all these countries fluently with no discernable accent. Another small book of prose with six illustrations by Leon Kelly, Petit manuel pour la circulation dans le neant, was published two years later.
Molinaro's literary roots were decidedly international and modernist, based on her rich education and her travels and her proficiency in languages. She admired Baudelaire, Goethe, Faulkner, Beckett, Giraudoux, Cocteau, and Tennessee Williams. She deeply disliked literature she felt was based on gossip, and for that reason was known to skewer with great contempt the work of Proust, who she thought was a deplorable stylist, badly in need of editing. She also was a deprecator of Anglo-Saxon naturalism, holding up Dickens as an example of the type of literal-minded writer one should not aspire to be. She was more likely to evince a passion for the decadent writer Huysmans, and she admired Lorca and D'Annunzio. Of course, she was able to read all of these writers in their original language.
At some point in the 1950s, presumably after Molinaro had made the switch from writing in French to writing in English, influential literary agent Georges Borchardt decided to represent her. This association would prove fruitful in the 1960s and early 1970s, when her novels would be published by Harper & Row and New American Library in the United States and Julliard and Grasset in French, but it would dry up by the late seventies, when Molinaro began to seem unmarketable to the Borchardt agency and began to receive less and less attention from them.
The first people to publish Molinaro in the States were Cecil Hemley of Noonday and Themistocles Hoetis, who was editor of Zero. One of the Molinaro stories from Cecil Hemley's magazine Prism, "The Insufficient Rope," would later be included in the 1963 anthology Best American Short Stories. Starting in 1958, Molinaro was co-founder and fiction editor of the Chelsea Review, which began to publish some of the most innovative and avant-garde work on the international scene, including hers. However, she gave up that editorship in 1965, partly because of increasingly negative relations with the magazine's moneyed benefactor and co-editor Sonia Raiziss, with whose young adopted son, Peter St. Mu, Molinaro had fallen deeply in love. By 1964, with the publication of her first novel, The Borrower, in a French translation of her original English version, she already had emerged as an important playwright on the off-off Broadway scene and a noted short-story writer. (1) This must have been the time when the fully formed persona of "Ursule Molinaro, American writer" emerged. This new persona was, in part, a miraculous disappearing act, an attempt to excise not only her voice as a French writer, but many of the painful memories of her European childhood and her incarceration during the German occupation of France. Although she rarely provided details about her upbringing, in the 1990s she did write a book-length text, still unpublished, which she playfully described as a memoir, although she never revealed how factual or imaginary it was. It describes an extremely alienated little girl, brought up by a widowed mother in a high-bourgeois or perhaps aristocratic, provincial European household of mostly unsympathetic adult relatives, including a sadistically hostile grandmother. Molinaro's later flight throughout France in an attempt to evade occupation authorities and her subsequent imprisonment during the occupation, presumably for hiding a Jewish couple in her home, are alluded to in several stories and plays, and they obviously became a devastating focus for her ideas about the cruelty of the human species and the tyranny of nationalism.
These traumatic events form in part the basis of her literary rebellion against family values, nationalistic hegemony, and the literary tradition of biography. Henceforth she would never associate herself with any family history or single ethnicity in her conversations. It was as if she had exiled all the disagreeable facts of her biography--especially those dealing with progeny and nation--to the realm of fiction, where, rather than repressing them, she was free to take a kind of revenge upon them--to rework them into satirical, philosophical, or political metaphors. Once Molinaro became established as an American writer, her origins and age--her entire past--would be a matter of speculation. The only clues to these were in her fiction. Few photos of her from the past or present ever appeared--she accused photography of stealing the surface while betraying the inner life--and interviewers often left frustrated in their attempts to draw the "story" of her life from her.
In her rebellion against the biographical tradition, as well as family and ethnic history, Ursule Molinaro eventually cast herself into a universe of one. Her obstinate honing of individuality would continue for four more decades of writing mostly fiction and plays. Her literary contacts would become less mainstream as time passed. Often working alone in a cultural vacuum, with little community support, Molinaro the ideologue and artist had only one strength upon which to rely--her prodigious literary craft. In a version of the Nietzschean superwoman, she had invented herself and her world. It was a world of social judgments and political values, but it has turned out to be no easy ally of that fusion of sociology and psychoanalysis we call new historicism or that blatant political activism in the world of literary scholarship that thinks of fiction as a minor platform. Molinaro's texts elude such analyses because they are obstinately and saliently eccentric. They are the crowning achievements of an individuality, loaded with her penchants, commonsense wisdom, multicultural tidbits, occult notions, and word play. Her character portrayals are always antipsychoanalytic (as was she), adhering more to pre-Freudian ideas of innate character, the interplay of humans and nature, existential choices, and even astrology than to formulas of early childhood experience.
Despite these eccentric characteristics, from the late 1970s, Molinaro's writing was often described as feminist. It is true that her fiction and plays show a pronounced concern with the injustices of social power. She is most at home when dealing with the mentalities or behavior of oppressed women as well as minority races, gays, and animals. Of course, such a perspective comes as no surprise. She grew up feeling oppressed in her own childhood home. In conversations with me she often expressed deep dissatisfaction with the roles available to women in her lifetime. She was, from a fairly early time in the twentieth century, an advocate of sexual freedom who enjoyed two husbands and affairs with several men and, most probably, some women. Although she had one daughter, she rejected the conventional role of motherhood, and her daughter spent most of her early years not with Molinaro but with Molinaro's mother. In her life, then, she resembled her characters: renegade women who insist upon libidinal freedom and authority. In addition, Molinaro's dissatisfaction with women's roles took blatant form in her novel … " - Bruce Benderson
