Recensione a Anilda Ibrahimi, "Non c’è dolcezza", Torino, Einaudi, 2012.

I review the novel Non c’è dolcezza (Einaudi 2012) by Anilda Ibrahimi, an Albanian writer who lives in Italy and writes in Italian. In her previous novels - Rosso come una sposa (Einaudi 2008) and L'amore e gli stracci del tempo (Einaudi 2009) – the author focuses her attention on the Balkans civil war and Albanian history.One of the main topics of her writing is the female condition in her country of origin: in her novels she portrays unconventional strong women, that, in spite of the basically patriarchal culture in which they are embedded, always represent the pillars of their families.Ibrahimi’s strong-willed female characters dismantle the stereotypical vision of submissive women that too often Italian readers have.Attention to gender issues, man-woman relationships and social and cultural conditioning are central in the writer’s fictional world.