Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
A Single Witness
by Christine Balint
Spinifex Press
April 2026, $28.00, 321 pages, ISBN: 9781922964342
Though set in eighteenth century Italy, Christine Balint’s gripping novel has a very contemporary feel. A girl has been sexually assaulted by a man but the onus appears to be on her. Sound familiar? In this case, it’s a thirteen-year-old girl, Anna Maria Bonon, raped by her ne’er-do-well father Giacomo in Piovene, a village in the Veneto region in the parish of Santo Stefano. Encouraged by the parish priest, Father Antonio, never to lie, she reports the facts to the Council of Ten in Vicenza, where her father is in prison for attempted murder. When Father Antonio asked her, Anna Maria had already confessed what had happened. “She will be struck down dead if she lies to a priest. He is the face of God on earth.”
The Council of Ten was one of the major governing bodies of the Republic of Venice, charged with the prosecution of all crimes involving the private lives of Venetian citizens. But after she tells the officials what her father has done, Father Antonio tells Anna Maria to retract her accusation, confusing the girl. Father Antonio “wants her to lie. Her grandmother wants her to lie. What I said before was untrue, she imagines saying. It is not true that my father raped me. He is a kind man. A good father. Tears sting her eyes.”
A Single Witness focuses on three main characters, Anna Maria, her grandmother, Cattarina (Nonna), and Father Antonio. Nonna doesn’t believe her son raped his daughter, though she knows he is violent; he has even hit and bruised her at times, after coming home drunk. In one episode he even kicks her out of the house when he comes home from the tavern; the old woman has to seek shelter elsewhere; it’s humiliating; the whole village knows. But Cattarina reasons that if Giacomo is imprisoned, there will be no man to protect them, and shame will have been brought on the family. For his part, Father Antonio is afraid of the violent Giacomo and doesn’t want him to take revenge on him. Plus, he has a cushy position as priest in Piovene and doesn’t want to rock the boat, afraid he could be excommunicated if there is a scandal.
A Single Witness is based on a true story in which a man is convicted of raping his daughter and sentenced to hard labor. But it’s not quite as simple as that in the novel. Anna Maria hardly comes out of it as a “winner.” Christine Balint develops the story from the scant historical record. There are no winners; there may not even be any “justice.”
Balint brings home the sheer terror that the girl lives under as she develops into a woman, living with an unpredictable, violent father and her frail grandmother. Her mother died several years before, along with her baby sister. We witness the rape from the girl’s point of view and understand her terror, at the mercy of this brute that is her father. She has already reported his behavior to the priest and to her employer, the kindly but ultimately ineffectual Bianchin, for whom she cards wool at his mill.
In the end, Father Antonio arouses the contempt of the villagers who all shun him. He keeps his job, yes, but his housekeeper leaves him and his congregation deserts him. Even his sister Grazia calls him out for his cowardice. “I am shocked at you.”
Balint develops the background of all of the major characters in the little village of Piovene, from Cattarina’s unfortunate marriage to Pietro, Giacomo’s father, who has the same shortcomings as his son – unreliable, drunk, violent – to Father Antonio’s ineptitude as a young man, a disappointment to his father, who wanted capable sons skillful at carpentry. “It was, he knew, a failure and not a sense of achievement that had made his father consider the church for him,” he reflects. In the end, though, it is Antono’s cowardice that earns the reader’s contempt. There are also the villagers, Zipatti and Bianchin who run the mill, Valdango and Buontempo, peasants who express their concerns for Anna Maria, Barto, the sweet boy who aspires to the priesthood, and a cast of characters Balint has created to bring the village alive.
To help make ends meet, Anna Maria and her grandmother raise silkworms, breeding them from moth larvae to cocoon for their raw silk, feeding them mulberry leaves. In allusive chapter titles, Balint metaphorically describes the fragility of Anna Maria’s existence – and that of all women in that area. As young Anna Maria reflects, “As a woman, you could be engaged, married or widowed. Women only became spinsters if they were considered unmarriageable. It was an ugly word.” The best Anna Maria can hope for is marriage. Her father destroys that possibility.
Some of the chapters in A Single Witness are titled, “Galéte, Cocoon,” “Luzertola, A cocoon that is particularly clear and shiny,” “Filare la lana, To spin the wool,” “Falopo, A rotten silkworm in a cocoon,” “Shufaja, A cocoon that is perforated by the moth’s wings thus breaking the continuity of the thread,” “Cao, the beginning or end of the thread,” “Bigatiéra, The box in which the silkworm larvae are brought home,” “Peléta, A thin veil of silk that wraps the dead silkworm in its cocoon,” “Vaca, a silkworm that dies before making a cocoon,” “Bigato, a dead chrysalis,” “Uvi, The eggs or seeds of the silkworm moth,” and “Bava di Séda, silk thread emerging from the mouth of the silkworm.”
Thus, Balint hints at the fate of all women.
In the end, Anna Maria has found a home in a convent in Venice, the Incurabili, where she was recommended by a kindly nun in Vicenza, Sorella Teresa. (“They take women who have been ill-used by men.”) “In six months, she has seen no one from her previous life. She feels as severed from her life before as a moth emerging in its new form.” When she meets again with the kindly Barto, she tells him, “I have learned to make lace.” It’s a kind of triumph, though she continues to be haunted by her memories, awakened by nightmares.
Dedicated to the “memory of the women who suffered in silence, those who spoke out and those who believed them,” the book’s title comes from the epigraph to the novel, which is from a Venetian proverb: “It takes seven women to make a single witness.” (Serve sette femene par fare un soeo testimone.)
Spinifex Press publishes both fiction and non-fiction on subjects of feminist interest, including lesbian literature, women’s health, violence against women, prostitution and pornography. Other Spinifex titles include Rose Hunter’s Body Shell Girl, a memoir in verse about a young woman’s dehumanizing experience in the sex industry in Canada, and Shattered Motherhood by Donna F. Johnson, about mothers surviving the guilt of a child’s suicide. A Single Witness is a worthy addition to the Spinifex list of books.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press, See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books, The Trapeze of Your Flesh from Blazevox Books, and most recently, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, published by Kelsay Books.