Alina Bronsky

> She has a small, wrinkled face and narrow, dark-brown eyes. She is tiny and round, barely reaching a meter and a half . This is Baba Dunja, and this is how a journalist describes her; but the name the author gave her would suffice: *baba*, synonymous with old woman, and *dunja*, an affectionate diminutive that in South Slavic stands for "quince." Unlike Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian fairy tal

The theme of this novel is closely akin to that of Domenico Starnone’s *Vita mortale e immortale della bambina di Milano*, recently reviewed on this site. Just as the Neapolitan writer’s narrative turns on the figure of the “servant grandmother” and her love—subsequently betrayed—for her grandson, here too a grandmother stands at the center of the story: a grandmother ready to place herself at the