Ferrovie del Messico - Gian Marco Griffi

 

Meh. 

Acclaimed by the hipsters-who-know as one of the greatest Italian books in recent memory, this picaresque novel made famous by word-of-mouth left me initially untouched, and ultimately bored. 

Initially untouched because the few humorous moments are separated by long pages of forced irony and self-congratulatory prose. 

Yes, you've done your research. Yes, you can write pretty well. But do you need to remind the reader (directly or indirectly) at every page?

And ultimately bored because this book just goes on and on for hundreds of pages (8+, to be precise) and that was so completely unnecessary...

Most likely the novel on Italian Fascism that had the smallest impact on me. Disappointing to say the least...

I Giorni di Vetro - Nicoletta Verna

 

Once in a while, it's quite good to realize that there are contemporary Italian writers that, well, know how to write. Like so many in her generation, Verna appears to have a remarkably sombre approach to writing, but even then the story is truly a compelling one. 

The reader understands both the appeal and horror of the titular Vetro, and the deep flaws of his friend (and Redenta's father) get more and more disturbing as the pages turn. Yet, what stands out is the inspiring forms of resistance (be it to a regime, to societal norms, or to family members) that the book celebrates in what feels at times like a touching tribute to Fenoglio. 

And while the surprising spin towards the end of the book (the identity of the mysterious Diaz) is really rather expectable, the surprise in the very final pages (what happened at the ball that marked so much of Redenta and Bruno's lives) is truly surprising. 

54 - Wu Ming

  

Dad doesn't read as much as mum, and as such doesn't recommend nearly as much. Of the two books I read on his advice, I found one borderline unreadable and the other an incredible work that gave me a little bit of faith in Italian literature. This is the latter of the two. 

Wu Ming is a writing collective that doesn't seek celebrity. It seeks good writing, and man do they achieve it with 54. 

I was skeptical of a story involving Cary Grant (I didn't have a great experience with Stan Laurel in Triste, Solitario y Final and I think that affected me), but his plot was beautifully woven into the other parallel stories. Plus, I got enough hidden references to feel smug. 

And the stories of former partisans, fighters and comrades trying to come to terms with the post-war Italy they had contributed to create were full of pathos and unusual insights. 

Easily one of the best books I've read in 2022, and one that lifted my mood this last Christmas break.

Vino e Pane – Ignazio Silone

One of the books that I got from my grandparents’ shelves (my granddad – despite oddly still remembering most of the first book of the Iliad by heart – is, well, rather “forgetful” these days, and a couple of years ago my grandma has made the rather commendable decision to only read newspapers).

Vino e Pane is a good book about Fascism and its impact on small secluded Italian hamlets. It’s also a book about Catholic piety and communist resistance (I favour one of the two, you can guess which one…) that is probably at its best when the two intertwine, like in the figure of the old Don Benedetto.

While the success that the book has enjoyed, in particular outside of Italy, is perfectly understandable, the quality of this work doesn’t match that of Silone's Fontamara or, for someone who has spent years reading books about Fascist Italy, of most of the works of Fenoglio, Vittorini, Malaparte, Levi, Revelli… So while I’m glad I’ve read it, Vino e Pane doesn’t really crack the top-10 of my favourite novels about the Italian resistance.  

Un Giorno di Fuoco – Beppe Fenoglio

And this is a collection of short stories that means a lot to me but, I have to recognize, probably will mean nothing to most non-Italian readers (save maybe a few people from Southern France whose experiences and family histories may have been rather similar).

But, refusing to leave my bias aside, I think that Fenoglio might have been the best Italian writer of the 20^th century (surely Il Partigiano Johnny and Una Questione Privata deserve to be considered among the 50 most significant Italian books published over the last 100 years). True, his characters smoke a lot and might have values that are at times anachronistic and at times awfully politically incorrect by today’s standard, but Fenoglio manages to bring to life the common wisdom of the peasantry and their daily problems like no other author, and the short stories of Un Giorno di Fuoco (many of which have nothing to do with Resistance and anti-fascism) are no exceptions. 

Suite Francaise - Irène Némirovsky

Bad historian (yet again) I had never read anything by Irène Némirovsky until my mother decided to invest a cheeky pound at Oxfam and buy me a copy of this novel.

Which, in my view, is actually two novels of extremely uneven quality. On the one hand, Tempête en Juin is an unusual portrayal of a defeated nation and its weaknesses, but on the other hand Dolce is a fairly boring and uneventful description of life in the countryside in occupied France with romantic overtones (seriously, ask Fenoglio how to write a novel about Nazi occupation and its impact on the countryside).

Of all the parallel plots that interlink in Tempête en Juin, the story of Philippe Péricands and “his” kids is breathtakingly beautiful in a way that only French stories about children of the 40s and 50s can be (Les Choristes, Au revoir les enfants), and is a reminder of how unstable the lives of troubled youth at the time could be, very much like in Les Quatre Cents Coups.

The one thing I struggle to understand though, is how Némirovsky managed to have an early draft of the two pieces of the Suite that was already so polished – had I been fighting against time like she was, I think I would have desperately tried to finish a very messy first draft of the whole book before allowing myself to re-read it even once. But then again, I’m not a great writer…

Fontamara – Ignazio Silone

Another book stolen from my granddad’s bookshelf. It must have been sitting there for some 40 years. I’m not someone who sees poetry everywhere in the world, but I really find it kind of neat that it smells just like my grandparents’ flat… Clearly, this is another book about Italian Fascism and it is, surprisingly, the one that seems to be best known abroad. Given the recent new evidence published about Silone’s dealings with the Fascist police, I have the feeling I will struggle to be fully objective, but anyway here it goes.

I do realize that Fontamara was published during the “years of consensus” for the Fascist regime  and that Silone’s position was fairly radical and incredibly dangerous at the time (although he published the novel while in exile). However, 80 years on, I am a much bigger fan of Fenoglio’s gritty or Vittorini’s epic anti-fascism than of Silone’s fable-like one.

As I already mentioned a couple of times, I’m not exactly fond of great allegoric portrayals of human nature: I’d be much happier if the evil entrepreneur represented just himself and not the whole of capitalism and its aggressiveness, or if the fickle lawyer was not meant to be a portrayal of the Italian upper-middle class and its acquiescence to Fascism. Also, while the idea of telling the story from the points of view of three members of the same family (a couple and their son) was undoubtedly avant-garde for the period, the fact that the style of the narration doesn’t change when it’s a teenage boy or a middle-aged woman presenting the story makes me question the quality of Silone as a writer.

 

That said, the book is a great display of how in many ways the Fascist revolution was “unrevolutionary”, and how the poor and oppressed remained poor and oppressed. After all that was what my Ph.D. was about, so at least from that point of view I did find the book extremely interesting…

Il Sentiero dei Nidi di Ragno – Italo Calvino

A few years ago I bought for just a couple of Euros the complete works of Calvino. I got excited and thought I was going to read them all, then quickly got bored. Il Sentiero dei Nidi di Ragno, however, is special. Not so much because it’s about the Resistance against Italian Fascism, but mostly because it’s an entirely different Calvino from the one I was used to – not fully realist (despite the fact that the novel has been considered neorealist by some), but not even completely fantastical.

The novel is touching and deep. It offers an allegoric portrayal of the internal divisions of Italian partisans that is both sad and accurate at the same time. The character of Cugino (Cousin) is the kind of rock we all wish we could have in our lives.

Yet, in spite of all this, Il Sentiero dei Nidi di Ragno – probably because is focuses on the story of what is, at the end of the day, just a kid – lacks the elements of violence that to me are so essential to Resistance novels. After all even Calvino himself admitted that the book his entire generation would have dreamt of writing was actually Fenoglio’s Una Questione Privata.

Il Prete Giusto – Nuto Revelli

Another wonderfully moving book by Nuto Revelli. And yet another one about Italian Fascism (in my defence, I hadn’t written about one of those in a while).

Similarly to Il Mondo dei Vinti, this is oral history at its finest. However, Raimondo Vitale, isn’t like the poor peasants of the other masterpiece by Revelli, he is a man capable of shaping his own destiny (at least to an extent) and to help others. The word “giusto” in the title does not signify that Viale was a just man, but that he was – rightfully – named “Righteous among the nations” because of the help he gave to persecuted Jewish families during the Second World War.

This is a book that students in their final year of high-school should be forced to read (in Italy and France, at least), but again I’m afraid we’re not going to run the risk of that happening anytime soon. So bring on pointless feuillettons from the early 19^th century (yes, to this day I am still very fond of Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi)

Sostiene Pereira – Antonio Tabucchi

Often people forget that, in the sea of mediocrity that has been the Italian literary landscape for the last 20 years or so, some great books have still been written. And that’s a shame. Often people forget that – though softer than many of its contemporaries – Salazar’s Estado Novo was still a Fascist regime. And that’s probably an even greater shame.

Sostiene Pereira is an excellent book. The reader feels for the uncertainties, aloofness and naivety of old Pereira and at the same time falls in love with the charming and young Monteiro Rossi. The constant repetition of the fact that “Pereira maintains” most of the things happening in the book is a wonderful way to keep the pace of the novel. Lisbon’s melancholy comes alive in Tabucchi’s pages (even more so than in Saramago’s ones in my opinion). And the clarification, in a note at the end of the book, on the racial/religious connotations of Portuguese surnames coming from names for fruit trees (“Pereira” means “pear tree” in Portuguese) puts the novel under a different light.

The movie by Roberto Faenza is also something that should have enjoyed more success than it did, seeing together some of the greatest European actors of the last 30 years (and more): Stefano Dionisi (already mentioned for his role in Il Paritigiano Johnny), the inimitable Marcello Mastroianni, Daniel Auteuil, and Joaquim De Almeida. Ah, and also Nicoletta Braschi, who I think has made a career just out of being Benigni’s wife (why even Jim Jarmusch felt like giving her important roles in some of his movies is just beyond me).

I Ventitré Giorni della Città di Alba – Beppe Fenoglio

Now that I think about it, this was the first book by Fenoglio that I read, at a time in which I hadn’t really started reading yet, and when all the partisans in these short stories had the face of either Stefano Dionisi (who portrayed Johnny in the dramatically underrated movie taken from Il Partigiano Johnny) or of my grandfather (whom I’ve never met, and so was always pictured in my mind as the dashing 20-something year old that I saw in my grandma’s photo albums).

Every place has its proud moments, that get passed down and glorified from generation to generation, and in my region there are very few of those that can compare with the twenty-three days of existence of the Partisan Republic of Alba (one of the first cities in Northern Italy to be – momentarily – freed from Fascist rule).

Fenoglio was a supremely talented writer, able to strip the partisans of their myth and paint them for what they really were: ill-equipped scared little kids with their hearts in the right place. Needless to say, the six stories about the Resistance War in this collection have had much more of an impact on me than those on agricultural life in the period (still extremely interesting, just way less inspiring).

I Piccoli Maestri – Luigi Meneghello

A book that was given to me by two of my favourite Italian high-school teachers before I left for Canada. Too bad one of the two was my Greek and Latin teacher – I really liked him and I think he liked me, yet he was forced to fail me in a good 50% of my in-class tests (I only passed the other half because I was able to cheekily copy from a friend).

This book is, clearly, about Fascism (my teachers were also quite political) and it stands to the Resistance in the Italian North-East in much the same way as Fenoglio’s books stand to the Resistance in the Italian North-West. In addition, I have the feeling Meneghello’s writing might be more accessible than Fenoglio’s (and, compared to Il Partigiano Johnny, I Piccoli Maestri is both thinner and written entirely in Italian – the many English expressions in Il Partigiano Johnny are fantastic for bilingual people, but might be a bit too highbrow otherwise).

In this book, Meneghello gives a great outline of the options open to 20-year olds Italians after 1943, not a single one of which was easy (even hiding). It also paints a perfect picture of the difficulties faced by the partisans, often little more than boys, during a brutal civil war.

Unlike Fenoglio, Meneghello lived long enough to still make TV appearances in my youth, and even in his 80s he was still a uniquely inspirational figure.