Uomini e No – Elio Vittorini

Italian youth is extremely politicized. Even in the early 2000s most of our weekends were spent yelling “Fascista”, or “Comunista”, with the suffix “di merda” to kids across the street (I was on the yelling end of the earlier, and, quite proudly, on the receiving end of the latter). When interviewed about the great merits of Fascism, kids dressed in tight black jackets and wearing knee-high boots would point out that “when he was around” trains were leaving on time, swamps were being reclaimed, and the Pope came to recognize the Italian state (yay!).

Nobody ever pointed out that, had it not been for Fascism, we would have never had Resistance literature, Beppe Fenoglio, and Elio Vittorini. Yes, their style was crude, the pages that described the lull between battles often more interesting than the ones about their fights, and the number of cigarettes their main characters would smoke was simply staggering. Yet, these books are possibly the best Italian novels of the 20^th century, and Uomini e No is amongst the finest of them all.

The book was written before the end of the war, and the fact that its main character – of whom we only know the battle-name “Enne 2” – dies but makes a new recruit minutes before being killed by the Fascists is a message of hope that was probably much needed at that point in time. Then again, for much that I love them, I would trade Fenoglio and Vittorini for an extra 20 years of democracy and, possibly, one fewer ill-conceived entry into a World War.