connect with others” (146). Indeed, in fiction and non-fiction, the epistle contin- ues to inspire readers and writers. Beautifully written, and accessible, this book can be appreciated by specialists and non-specialists interested in literary and episto- lary studies, women’s fiction, and Italian studies. SONIA CANCIAN Concordia University Maria Rosa Cutrufelli. Reasonable Doubt (Complice il dubbio). Translated by Giuliana Sanguinetti-Katz and Anna Urbancic. Willard, ON: Soleil, 2007. Pp. 181. ISBN 978-1-894935-29-6. n.p. Complice il dubbio is the second novel of Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, a well-known Italian feminist journalist, editor, critic and author of 5 widely translated novels. Cutrufelli’s first novel, La Briganta, a fictional memoir of a female brigand cast in the historical novel genre, appeared in 1990. In this long-overdue English transla- tion of Complice il dubbio, originally published in 1992 and adapted for the Italian screen in 1998, Cutrufelli plays with another genre dear to postmodern and fem- inist writers, the detective/crime novel. Introducing the translation are two excel- lent critical essays, “Explorations in Female Sexuality” (Sanguinetti-Katz) and “Reading Reasonable Doubt: The Spaces of the Imagination” (Anne Urbancic), which outline well several critical issues for debate. Complice il dubbio begins with a mysterious death. Anna, a thirty-five year old female medical doctor who has separated from her husband to avoid becoming a “prisoner of her marriage.’(80), is running through the empty streets of Rome in August to get back to her apartment the morning after an arranged evening sexu- al encounter with an architect about the same age. The man, recently separated from his wife, was already quite drunk and obviously depressed on her arrival but she decided to spend the night. In the morning, after pinning her down on the bed, the deranged man committed suicide and Anna flees home in order to pon- der when and how she could go to the police. As the reader learns more about Anna’s carefully controlled and respectable life, this calculated tryst begins to appear less a deviation from her normal behav- iour than an extension of her mania to control spaces, both physical and imagi- nary. As Anne Urbancic notes in her critical essay, Cutrufelli’s representations of space and utilization of the literary trope of chiasmus show that Anna, orphaned at age four and raised by her grandmother in a ground floor apartment where she could and still does hide from others, consistently reproduces spaces in which she can “cocoon” safely or present an emotionless exterior. Feeling exceptionally alone in a deserted Rome, she had decided to create another impermeable space for a casual sexual life, one she assumed she could keep secret and, of course, control as she examined her emotional side. Yet, spaces in this narrative are not impermeable, thanks to the most promi- nent character in the novel, Doubt. That same morning, Anna offers assistance to RECENSIONI — 206 —