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…

La Malora – Beppe Fenoglio

A rare work of art by Fenoglio that is not about Italian Fascism. It’s still about “my” hills though, so I’m obviously still biased. My heart clearly considers this (like pretty much anything else by Fenoglio) to be one of the best books of the Italian 20^th century. However, I do fully realize that most readers will (fairly rightfully) agree to disagree with me.

Because at the end of the day this book is about something so local, from the landscape of the area to the actual challenges faced by Agostino and his family, that it is probably really hard to understand for outsiders. I’ve grown up walking, hiking, and cycling on those hills, looking at the farms and fields that Fenoglio talks about. For anyone that hasn’t done this, the book is bound to be extremely dry, probably too grim, and the small accomplishments and huge hurdles in Agostino’s way are probably going to be almost incomprehensible.

Yet, for someone who has grown up on those hills and whose granddad was a “countryside serf”, as they called themselves, much like the novel’s protagonist, this is a work of incomparable beauty. And it seems hard to believe that those harsh hills are now on everybody’s mouths because of their wines.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – Alan Sillitoe

This book found me rather than it being the other way around. Captivated by its title, I picked it up in the public library in Imperia, the town on the Italian Riviera where my family has a tiny flat (so tiny it’s actually a small room – not even classifiable as a studio).

In spite of all its anger, the book made me happy. Because the main story is about waking up early to go for a run, about competing, about training even when it’s so cold you can’t feel your fingers and it’s so dark you can barely see the ground you are stomping on. All that, in my case, chasing the dream of one day finally breaking 17 minutes on a 5k in a small park in South East London...

But the book is more than just that. The other short stories in the collection also deserve their due credit as they are probably the most credible portraits of the life of the working class in the Midlands and Northern England after the end of the Second World War that I have ever read.

Il Mondo dei Vinti – Nuto Revelli

And yet another Italian book about... Fascism! Well, not quite, or at least, not just that. Anyway, one of the books that I read for (or instead of doing?) my Ph.D.

This is a display of oral history at its finest, probably the only non-fiction book that I will write about in this blog. I wish Italian high-schools could force students to read this, but it’s unlikely to happen in a country where the school system somehow still works yet students read Cosmo at best.

Il Mondo dei Vinti is a collection of short stories/interviews to the everyday poor people of Northern Italy. The reader dives head first into the memories of these people, and one is bound to wonder whether it made any difference to them whether a tiny king, a petty dictator or a hopeful Prime Minister were taking the big decisions in Rome.