Although she is little-known outside Italy, Sapienza's reputation on "the continent" as her Sicilian protagonist Modesta refers to it, is prestigious, but The Art of Joy, though it contains much brilliant writing, is a remarkably dreary masterpiece. The novel is often compared to Hermann Hesse's 1922 Siddharta, whose title from the Sanskrit means "he who has found meaning in existence", and Italian critics have focused on its celebratory qualities, on Modesta's joyful impermeability to both morals and mores, at the expense of its immaturity.
Modesta is in many ways a model of the picaresque heroine, but with two significant exceptionsm — she is both genuinely criminal, murdering at least four people in the first section of the novel, and entirely humourless. Sapienza implies an existential relationship between Modesta's ongoing sexual liberation and her disregard for the rights of others, but fails to investigate this convincingly within its own terms. To expect fictional revolutionaries to be charming is naive, but as George Eliot's struggles in Daniel Deronda or Felix Holt illustrate, it is also extremely difficult to make them engaging. The oppressed proletariat don't tend to do jokes, so while the political passages of the novel may be worthy, their earnestness is discouraging. The contrast between the indolent south and the politicised north of Italy is hammered home, purportedly to the latter's advantage, but by the time Antonio Gramsci appears as a walk-on, one wishes oneself back in the convent.
Modesta's ethical development is intrinsically concerned with nothing more than her own advantage — "it is necessary to study the emotions that others awaken in us just as we study grammar or music." Despite her courageous sexuality and insistence on the intellect as the only means of achieving strength, Modesta's consciousness remains as barren as the volcanic plain where she is born. She encounters the problems of existence at their most extreme, yet the will to happiness of this lesbian socialist Pollyanna can feel relentless. Sapienza emphasises that the only way to a fully realised existence, particularly as a woman, is to connect the disparate parts of the self, yet Modesta is incapable of acknowledging her own amorality, conflating the merely transgressive with the progressive. Perhaps in this, The Art of Joy is indeed an accurate reflection of Italian political life, which continues to combine touching innocence with staggering, and staggeringly unexamined, levels of corruption.
An admirer of Sapienza's claimed that "Goliarda does not exist. She is existence." Modesta's journey to self-realisation may be celebrated in Italy as a "hymn to the plenitude of life", but by page 670 of The Art of Joy one can't help wishing she had discovered the meaning of existence rather sooner.
