The ANNOTICO Report

'The Almond Picker' was a Best Seller in Italy, and a winner of four
European Literary Prizes, including the "Casino de Santiago Prize" for Best
European Novel, 2003.

In 1963 Roccacolomba, Sicily, Italy, there is gossip, backbiting,
cliquishness, and petty squabbles.  The town’s folk keep each other in line
with the tried and true methods of guilt and shame and everyone knows
everyone else’s business, good or bad.(Sounds an awful lot like our Condo
Association :)

Hornby relates the story of Mennulara (meaning "the almond picker" in
Italian) née Maria Rosalia Inzerillo, the faithful servant of the Alfallipe
family, one of the town’s most prominent.

Mennu was a dirt poor peasant who went into service for the Alfallipe’s at
13 to support her ailing mother and sister. She learned to read and
educated herself in art, music, land management, finance, and whatever else
interested her. She ends up running the Alfallipe house, lands and
accounts, saving their waning fortunes and precarious social position.

Mennu is painted as a prickly, opinionated woman who was ruthless in
business and knew how to accomplish what she wished. There is much
resentment among the townspeople who believe she didn’t know her place as a
servant or a woman.

Mennu rise and demise is revealed while the town is exposed and explored.

Simonetta Agnello Hornby was born in Palermo, Sicily. She completed Law
Studies in London, where she now lives and serves as Chairman of  the
Tribunal of Special Educational Needs.

The Book Slut
Beth Dugan
April 2005

Small towns are the same everywhere you go, as Simonetta Agnello Hornby
shows us with her first novel The Almond Picker. Even in 1963 Roccacolomba,
Italy, there is gossip, backbiting, cliquishness, and petty squabbles. The
town’s folk keep each other in line with the tried and true methods of
guilt and shame and everyone knows everyone else’s business, good or bad.
Hornby relates the story of Mennulara (meaning "the almond picker" in
Italian) née Maria Rosalia Inzerillo, the faithful servant of the Alfallipe
family, one of the town’s most prominent.

On the day of Mennulara’s death, the mystery of her life starts to unfold.
And that is really what this story is, a mystery. Mennu was a dirt poor
peasant who went into service for the Alfallipe’s at 13 to support her
ailing mother and sister. She learned to read and educated herself in art,
music, land management, finance, and whatever else interested her. She ends
up running the Alfallipe house, lands and accounts, saving their waning
fortunes and precarious social position.

Mennu is painted as a prickly, opinionated woman who was ruthless in
business and knew how to accomplish what she wished. There is much
resentment among the townspeople who believe she didn’t know her place as a
servant or a woman. Hornby tells Mennu’s story throughout the week
following her death by relating how it affects the various people in
Roccacolomba. Her friendships with the town doctor and priest are laid bare
and they think back about their relationships with the complicated women
they knew. The enemies of the Alfallipes all have stories about Mennu that
they relate through gossip. The Alfallipe’s behavior disintegrates
throughout the week as they scheme and plot to get what they assume is
Mennu’s fortune. In the space of two weeks they undo all of Mennu’s hard
work in propping their family up in the eyes of the Roccacolomba community.

This is not a "page turner." There is little intrigue since the most
interesting person in the story dies in the first chapter. There are no
titillating plot twists, justice is not meted out to the wicked, and the
ending is neither happy nor sad. This is a sleepy character study in
reverse. It is archaeology. The reader is taken on the journey of how Mennu
became who she was when she died. The town is exposed and explored and
shown to be just a town where things happen, like any other town. The
characters in the town list toward stock character qualities but it is
their interaction in Mennu’s life that saves them from being stereotypes.

Hornby’s prose is quiet and unassuming and her dialogue believable. Instead
of letting her audience figure out who Mennu really was, there is an
inexplicable expository letter written that ties off loose ends and
packages the mystery up neatly at the finale of the book. Would that Hornby
had let her readers finish the puzzle themselves, but she seems to have
lost her nerve at the end. Hornby does an exceptional job of setting the
place of Roccacolomba. Totally immersion in the warm air, cobbled streets,
lush gardens, and traditional food lubricates the telling and Roccacolomba
springs to life. This book feels like a mini-vacation to sunny Italy.

Fiction
The Almond Picker by Simonetta Agnello Hornby
Farrar Straus & Giroux

http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2
005_04_005342.php

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