Lara Cardella (born 13 November 1969 in Licata, Italy) is an Italian writer. She is best known for her best selling novel Good Girls Don't Wear Trousers.
Career
Cardella's first book Good Girls Don't Wear Trousers (in Italian: Volevo i pantaloni), written when she was nineteen, caused a scandal in the small Sicilian community where she lived because it fiercely criticized what she perceived as the backwardness and chauvinism of contemporary Sicilian society. One commentator labeled her Italy's Salman Rushdie.
She then changed publisher, leaving Mondadori for Rizzoli. With this publisher she released Detesto il soft (1997), a dreamy novel centred on morbid sexuality, and Finestre accese (2000), her last novel so far, where the lives of the two main female characters are followed down the years through the entries in their personal journals and where Cardella addresses for the first time the theme of mafia.
Themes
Through the years Cardella has experimented various styles and narrative solutions, from the traditional novel (Volevo i pantaloni, Una ragazza normale) to the contamination between novel and drama (Intorno a Laura), from the dreamlike atmospheres of Detesto il soft to the journal (Finestre accese).
There are however some basic themes recurring in much of her work, as the main focus of the plot or lying under the surface, such as chauvinism, rape, the backward and negative aspects of Sicilian traditional society. In Una ragazza normale and Detesto il soft the subjects of sexuality and death are addressed in a fascinating morbid way. A general sense of pessimism and fatalism permeates much of her writings.
Selected works
In English
- Good girls don't wear trousers, London, H.Hamilton, 1993
In Italian
- Finestre accese, Milan, Rizzoli, 2000
- Detesto il soft, Milan, Rizzoli, 1997
- Volevo i pantaloni 2, Milan, Mondadori, 1995
- Una ragazza normale, Milan, Mondadori, 1994
- Fedra se ne va, Milan, Mondadori, 1992
- Intorno a Laura, Milan, Mondadori, 1991
- Volevo i pantaloni, Milan, Mondadori, 1989