Tag: Italian literature

Author, Book review, Cesare Pavese, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Beautiful Summer’ by Cesare Pavese (translated by W.J. Strachan)

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 112 pages; 2018. Translated from the Italian by W.J. Strachan.

The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) won Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Strega Prize for fiction, in 1950. (The author sadly died by suicide a couple of months later.)

It’s the story of a teenage girl whose friendship with an older woman draws her into a bohemian artistic community in 1930s Turin, showing her an alternative way of life.

It has been reissued as part of Penguin’s European Writers series.

A girl’s life

Sixteen-year-old Ginia works at a dressmakers and lives with her brother, Severino, a nightshift worker, for whom she cooks and cleans.

To alleviate the mundane nature of her work and home life, she’s keen to go “gadding about”, as she describes it, so when she develops a friendship with 20-year-old Amelia who works as an artists’ model, her social life opens up. They go to dance halls, visit cafes and see films at the local movie house. But there’s always tension between them, because Ginia is cautious, whereas Amelia throws that all to the wind.

In public, Amelia dares to go bare-legged (because she can’t afford to buy stockings), making Ginia anxious and worried about what people might say. Yet this also holds an allure for her, because she’s fascinated by Amelia’s way of being in the world, her freedom and her carefree attitude.

‘Being free in the world in the way I am, makes me mad,’ said Amelia. Ginia would have gladly paid money to hear her hold forth so eagerly on many things which she liked, because real confidence consists in knowing what the other person wants and when someone else is pleased by the same things, you no longer feel in awe of her. (page 14)

Loss of innocence

In her short introduction to the novella, Elizabeth Strout explains that Pavese described it as “the story of a virginity that defends itself”. For most of the book, Ginia acts chastely but she’s fascinated by the adults around her and wages an internal battle to overcome her disgust and shame associated with what she sees and what she wants to experience for herself. She knows she has power over men but is fearful of wielding it.

When Amelia gets a new job posing naked for an artist, Ginia asks to watch, not for any voyeuristic tendencies but to observe the artist at work.

They discussed the question for a short part of the walk and Amelia laughed because, dressed or undressed, a model can only be of interest to men and hardly to another girl. The model merely stands there: what is there to see? Ginia said she wanted to see the artist paint her; she had never seen anyone handling colours and it must be nice to watch. (page 12)

When she gets to watch the proceedings, she finds she’s disgusted by the whole sexual objectification of her friend and her friend’s inability to understand that this is what is happening.

Once more she saw Amelia’s swarthy belly in that semi-darkness, that very ordinary face and those drooping breasts. Surely a woman offered a better subject dressed? If painters wanted to do them in the nude, they must have ulterior motives. Why did they not draw from male models? Even Amelia when disgracing herself in that way became a different person; Gina was almost in tears. (page 23)

Later, Amelia introduces her to two artists, Guido and Rodrigues, who share a studio. Ginia is intrigued by the enigmatic Guido, a soldier who is an artist in his spare time, and a love affair develops — ushering her into a more complex adult world.

Compelling novella

The Beautiful Summer has a simple set-up and follows a predictable outcome. But it’s written in such a rich, lyrical language, with an undercurrent of suspense and danger, it makes for a compelling read.

Strout suggests there are hints of Elena Ferrante in the narrative style, to which I concur. Its depiction of female friendship, including its petty rivalries, quarrels and sharing of confidences, is pitch-perfect, and I loved the melancholia at its heart.

It not only explores themes of youth, desire and loss of innocence, but it also poses questions about the male gaze, sexual objectification and women’s position in Italian society at the time. It demands a reread to properly unpick it, but has certainly made me keen to explore more of Pavase’s work — I read, and loved, The House on the Hill last year.

Author, Book review, Daunt Books, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Natalia Ginzburg, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘Valentino’ by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Avril Bardoni)

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Fiction – paperback; Daunt Books; 80 pages; 2023. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni.

What is it to be a “man of consequence”? And what happens if you don’t live up to that descriptor?

This is the focus of Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino, the tale of a much-doted-upon son who fails to live up to his parents’ expectations.

The titular Valentino, the only son of a retired school teacher, is lazy, vain and selfish. But there’s more to his story than meets the eye, and what is left unsaid in this carefully crafted novella, first published in 1957, is almost more important than what is.

A man of consequence

Valentino’s family has made many sacrifices to ensure he can go to medical school and buy all the necessary books and equipment to support his studies. When his father proudly states that this will make his son a “man of consequence”, what he really means is that he is counting on Valentino to lift them out of poverty and boost their social standing.

So it’s somewhat of a shock when Valentino finds a shortcut to riches by announcing he is betrothed to a wealthy older woman called Maddalena. The family are upset because they believe Valentino is getting married for the wrong reasons.

‘That woman is as ugly as sin,’ said my mother quietly. ‘She’s grotesque, Valentino. And since she boasts about being wealthy, everyone will assume that you are marrying her for her money. That’s what we think too, Valentino, because we cannot believe that you are in love with her, you who always used to chase the pretty girls, none of whom was ever pretty enough for you. Nothing like this has ever happened in our family before; not one of us has ever done anything just for money.” (page 11)

His older sister, Clara — who is married with three young children — is so angry about the situation, she calls him a dog under her breath.

But despite his family’s opposition, Valentino can’t see what the problem is — he thinks Maddalena “has lovely black eyes and the bearing of a lady”.

He was bored of all those pretty girls with nothing to talk about, while with Maddalena he could talk about books and a hundred other things. He wasn’t marrying her for her money; he was no pig. (page 12)

He settles into his new married life as if he were born into it and is at ease among Maddalena’s wealthy friends as he is his own family.

A caring daughter-in-law

And while his parents struggle to readjust — his father has a debt hanging over his head because he took out a loan to ensure the family was suitably attired at Valentino’s wedding — Maddalena proves to be a caring and thoughtful daughter-in-law.

When she finds out that Clara’s young son is sick, she arranges costly medical care for him. Later, she offers lodgings to Valentino’s younger sister Catarina, so that she can continue her teacher training studies. And all the while she runs her busy agricultural interests, continues to pay for Valentino’s long-dragged-out (neglected) medical studies, buys him lavish clothes, and bears him three sons.

But she keeps him at arm’s length and soon the quarrels start, where she accuses him of being a “layabout and a failure”.

Sister’s perspective

It is through Catarina’s eyes that we see how events unfold. She’s the put-upon daughter who looks after her parents and gives up any hope of finding a husband of her own. But as much as she’s disappointed by Valentino — she constantly worries that he’s not devoted to his studies and will fail his exams — she still loves him very much.

Without wishing to reveal plot spoilers, the story is neatly, and shockingly, upended in quite a profoundly unexpected way.

It’s a delicious treat of a book, written in Ginzburg’s typically understated but direct style. She’s so perceptive about family life, human behaviour and societal expectations, and every page offers up something frank and forthright. And she’s adroit at mixing the bittersweet with the poignant, with a dash of Italian fury thrown in for good measure.

Claire at Word by Word has also just reviewed this.

I have previously reviewed Giznburg’s All Our Yesterdays and The Dry Heart.

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 4 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world.

Daunt Books Publishing, which was founded in 2010, grew out of Daunt Books, an independent chain of bookshops in London and the South-East of the UK. You can find out more about them here.

1001 Books to read before you die, Author, Book review, Fiction, Giorgio Bassani, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Garden of the Finzi-Continis’ by Giorgio Bassani (translated by Jamie McKendrick)

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 240 pages; 2017. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, first published in 1962, is the third book in Giorgio Bassani’s “Novel of Ferrara” six-part series but can be read as a standalone.

At its most basic level, it is a story of unrequited love between two Italian college students, but it’s so much more than that. It touches on issues related to Italian Fascism, racial discrimination (all the characters are Jewish) and class, and explores memory, loyalty, friendship and family.

The story is told by an unnamed first-person narrator looking back on the events of his life in the northern Italian city of Ferrara some 20 years earlier. We find out right from the start that members of the Finzi-Contini family, with whom he was close, perished in a German death camp during the Second World War.

And then we are plunged into a slow-moving tale of how he befriended brother and sister Alberto and Micòl even though he was from a lower socio-economic class, and how he later fell in love with Micòl, who had

…weightless blond hair, with streaks verging on white, the blue, almost Scandinavian irises, the honeycoloured skin, and on her breastbone, every now and then leaping out from her T-shirt collar, the little gold disc of the shaddai.

Dangerous times

The narrative cleverly weaves in the changing political circumstances of the time to show how decisions by those in power directly affected the lives of ordinary citizens.

The story is set mainly during 1938 and 1939, right up until the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Racial laws have been introduced that restrict where Jewish people in Italy can socialise.

Alberto and Micòl open up their private tennis court, in the walled garden of their grand family home, to friends who have been ousted from the town’s official tennis club, and this is how our narrator grows close to the Finzi-Contini siblings and their slightly older friend, Giampi Malnate, a Christian and socialist with strongly held views that put him at odds with Italy’s Fascist rulers.

The foursome soon becomes three when Micòl heads to Venice to write her thesis. While she’s gone, our narrator, who is working on his own thesis, is expelled from the Public Library, so he is invited to use the personal library of Professor Ermanno Finzi-Contini which contains almost 20,000 books, “a large number of which — he told me — concerned mid-  and late-nineteenth-century literature”.

With an entire, specialized library at my disposal, and besides that, being oddly keen to be there every morning, in the great, warm, silent hall which received light from three big, high windows adorned with pelmets covered in red-striped white silk, and at the centre of which, clad in mouse-coloured felt, stretched the billiards table, I managed to complete my thesis on Panzacchi in the two and half months which followed.

Being let into the inner sanctum of the Finzi-Continis like this also allows our narrator to develop a personal relationship with Micòl’s father, who becomes a mentor, valued for his kindness, intellect and anti-Fascist beliefs.

This warm, nostalgic tone imbues most of the novel, but there is a  dark, almost self-pitying undercurrent because while our narrator is forced to contend with large political issues beyond his control, on the personal front, things aren’t much better. His desire for Micòl comes to a head in a confronting scene towards the end of the book, one that could be construed as a violation (at worst) and sexual harassment (at best).

Later, frustrated by Micòl’s lack of sexual interest in him, he convinces himself that she is seeing someone else, which is why she has not returned his love.

Distant voice

Interestingly, the narrator is the same one who features in Bassani’s The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, and like that book, the narrative takes a while to warm up. At first, the voice is staid, distant and almost bitter, but later opens out to be more thoughtful, introspective and self-aware.

I liked the way it contrasts the narrator’s family upbringing with that of the Finzi-Continis and shows how there are class divisions within the Jewish community. And yet, for all their class and privilege, or maybe because of it, the Finzi-Continis did not survive the Holocaust.

Frankly, this is a sad book, but it is punctuated with moments of joy and quiet scenes of normality that belie the tragedies that will soon unfold — and perhaps that’s what gives The Garden of the Finzi-Continis such astonishing power. We know what’s coming, but the characters at the heart of this story do not.

I read this book for The 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Karen, which ran between 16-22 October 2023, so am reviewing this a little belatedly. 

‘The Garden of the Finzi-Continis’, by Giorgio Bassani, first published in 1963, is listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, where it is described as a novel of “corrupted innocence and blighted talent and opportunity”, one that is also an “indictment of ordinary citizens too blind to see the threat of creeping authoritarianism and prejudice”.

1001 books, 20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, Carlo Levi, Italy, memoir, Non-fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, translation

‘Christ stopped at Eboli’ by Carlo Levi (translated by Frances Frenaye)

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Memoir – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 256 pages; 2000. Translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye.

Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi (1902-1975), is a beautifully evoked portrait of life in a remote village in Southern Italy in 1935, a place beset by poverty, superstition and ancient beliefs, a place so primitive that sending an educated man to live there was seen as a form of punishment. It was such a bad place, it was said that even Christ would never visit it — hence the title.

A first-hand account of Levi’s experience as a political exile banished from the north of Italy for anti-fascist activities under Mussolini, the book is as much an anthropological study as it is a memoir.

It is full of sublime observations and insights into a traditional way of life — and is probably the best book, and certainly the most interesting, I have read all year.

Banished to the south

Levi was a writer and painter from Turin who had a degree in medicine, but he had never practised as a doctor. He came from a wealthy Jewish family and had been arrested for political activism. (Wikipedia tells me he founded an anti-fascist movement in 1929 and became leader alongside Natalia Ginzburg‘s husband, Leone.)

When he is sent to Aliano (which he calls Gagliano because that is how the locals pronounce it), in what is now known as the region of Basilicata, he is forbidden from contacting the dozen or so other political prisoners living in the same village and must report daily to the fascist mayor.

Knowledge of his medical background precedes him, and soon the local peasants descend on him for treatment because they do not trust the local doctors who are incompetent. The region is plagued by malaria and trachoma (an eye disease that can cause blindness), and the level of illness, starvation and poverty he sees, especially in the children, is distressing.

A dozen women with children in their arms or standing beside them were patiently waiting for me to get up. They wanted to show me their offspring and have me attend to them. The children were pale and thin with big, sad black eyes, waxen faces, and swollen stomachs drawn tight like drums above their thin, crooked legs. Malaria, which spared no one in these parts, had already made its way into their underfed rickety bodies.

Among women

He comes to understand the locals as decent people, but their beliefs are largely superstitious and their customs ancient — most of them shun church. He is immediately warned to stay away from the women — he is a good-looking man — and must never take food or drink prepared by them for “they would be sure to put a philtre or love potion in it”.

The village is dominated by women in what he describes as a “matriarchal society” because most of the men have gone to America in search of work and a better life.

Those [men] who are left in the villages are the discarded, who have no talents, the physically deformed, the inept and the lazy; greed and boredom combine to dispose them to evil. Small parcels of farm land do not assure them a living and, in order to survive, the misfits must dominate the peasants and secure for themselves the well-paid posts of druggist, priest, marshal of the carabinieri, and so on.

A year in the life

Over the course of a year, Levi charts not only his interactions with these people with whom he becomes very fond but also the changing seasons and the beauty he finds in the landscape around him. His painterly eye is apparent in his vivid and ever-eloquent descriptions.

It was September and the heat was giving way to promises of autumn. The wind came from a different direction; it no longer brought with it the burning breath of the desert, but had a vague smell of the sea. The fiery streaks of the sunset lingered for hours over the mountains of Calabria and the air was filled with bats and crows. From my terrace the sky seemed immense, covered with constantly changing clouds; I felt as if I was on the roof of the world or on the deck of a ship anchored in a petrified ocean.

His time in exile is cut short, but when he is told he is free to leave he is reluctant to do so: something about the experience of living among these salt-of-the-earth types has irrevocably changed him and he has learned as much about himself — and the divisions within his own country — as he has of them. So, despite his loss of freedom, the distressing poverty he has seen, the never-ending disease, the “backward” customs he has had to negotiate and the greed and petty corruption of the village “elite”, the village has wormed its way into his soul.

The place and the people wormed their way into mine as well.

Christ Stopped at Eboli is a singularly beautiful memoir; it’s heartfelt without being sentimental, and insightful without being judgemental. It was first published in 1945 and translated into English in 1947.

There’s a film adaptation too. It was critically acclaimed, winning a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1983, and is available to view on the fee-paying Criterion Channel — I haven’t watched it, but it looks sublime.

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘The Aran Islands’ by J.M. Synge: an anthropological study of the people who lived on these ancient rocky islands in Galway Bay, untouched by modernity at the turn of the 19th century.

This is my 20th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it from Dymocks online earlier this year when I was looking for books similar to Cesare Pevase’s ‘The House on the Hill’, which I had enjoyed immensely.

‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’ by Carlo Levi, first published in 1945, is listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, where it claims the novel was an “international sensation” and “in a move toward social realism in postwar Italian literature, brought to the attention of the Italian public a long-neglected part of their own country”.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Giorgio Bassani, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles’ by Giorgio Bassani (translated by Jamie McKendrick)

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 144 pages; 2012. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick.

The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, by Italian writer Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), is the story of a platonic friendship between an older gay doctor and the Jewish university student he meets on the train. Both men’s lives become increasingly precarious as fascism takes hold during the 1930s — with heart-rending results.

Originally published in 1958, it is believed to be the first Italian work of fiction to feature “a homosexual figure as protagonist”, according to the translator, poet Jamie McKendrick.

Doctor’s secret life

The story is narrated in the first person by the unnamed student, who employs a staid, almost omnipresent, voice that takes a while to warm up (and which I initially did not like but soon grew to appreciate).

He tells us about Dr Athos Fadigati, an ENT specialist, originally from Venice, who had his own house and clinic in the northern Italian city of Ferrara. He was widely respected and was destined to enjoy a comfortable and uneventful career but — as we are told on the very first page — his life “ended up so badly, poor man, so tragically”.

From this clever bit of foreshadowing, the narrative spools back to cover the doctor’s life from 1919 to the late 1930s, a time synonymous with shifting political tensions in Europe, the rise of fascism in Italy and the outbreak of World War Two.

In Ferrara, in the 1920s, the doctor leads a busy life and is known to be a dapper dresser — he wears the titular gold-rimmed spectacles – and a social butterfly.

After an intense day’s work, he certainly liked to be among the crowd: the noisy, happy undifferentiated crowd. Tall, fat, with his homburg hat, his yellow gloves, or even, if it was winter, with his overcoat lined with opossum fur and with his stick slipped into the right side pocket near the sleeve, between eight and nine o’clock at night he might be seen at any place in the city.

By 1930, when he’s approaching 40, people are beginning to wonder why he hasn’t got married and settled down with children. The notion that he might be gay hasn’t crossed anyone’s mind.

Friendship on a train

Fast forward seven years, to 1937, when our narrator strikes up an acquaintance with him. They are both commuters on the Ferrara-Bologna train, a 45km journey that takes an hour and 20 minutes (when it’s on time), and sit in the same carriage, which is largely occupied by students heading to Bologna University, where our narrator is studying literature and the doctor is taking a university teaching degree.

In short we became friends: however it happened, from that time on, that is, from the end of April 1937, in the two or three carriages in which we used to barricade ourselves – framed by the window the countryside rushed past, already green, cool and luminous – on Tuesday and Friday mornings there was always a place also for Dr Fadigati.

The first to “out” Dr Fadigati is Eraldo Deliliers, a political sciences student with curly blond hair, who travels alongside them. He tells another travelling companion that the doctor is “an old queer” but most of the students have already clocked this — he’d been their family doctor for almost 20 years.

Did he know that we knew? Perhaps not. Perhaps on this question he still deceived himself. In the poised manner, however, in the polite and troubled reserve that he arduously maintained, it was only too easy to read the steady resolve to behave as if nothing about himself had ever been discovered in the city.

Things come to a head in the summer when many residents of Ferrara head to the Adriatic seaside town of Riccione for their annual vacation.

The doctor, almost brazenly, strikes up a “scandalous friendship” with Deliliers, who, it seems, is using him for a free holiday. The pair flit between hotels — “inspiring fierce indignation and endless rumours everywhere” — travelling by car, a brand-new two-seater red Alfa Romeo, and parading themselves without a care in the world.

Of course, it doesn’t end well — Delilier always preferred girls — but our narrator has other things to worry about. He’s Jewish, and there are rumours that racial laws are going to be introduced. His father, a member of the Fascist Party, is beginning to feel uneasy and worries about “the possibility of an outbreak of anti-Semitism in Italy as well, and suffering from it, he would allow the odd bitter word against the Regime to escape him”.

Through this fear of “othering” and persecution, our narrator aligns himself with the doctor, who has been at risk of both his entire life, and the pair’s friendship takes on a deeper meaning.

Politics of the person

Despite the brevity of this story — and the unexpectedly abrupt ending (you have been warned) — there is a lot going on here.

Bassani, who was himself Jewish and later imprisoned for anti-fascist activities, shows us how big political events of the time impacted people’s lives and livelihoods in often deeply personal ways.

By telling his tale through the lens of homosexuality, he shows how a gay man experienced ostracism, exclusion, violence and intimidation on a day-to-day basis, and that this was later mirrored by those Italians who experienced Nazi racism, railed against the Fascist state or took a different political stance to those in power.

Bassani also highlights the differences between sexual and racial persecution: the doctor quietly accepts that he must live his life according to societal norms, while the narrator rages against any idea that he should be singled out because he is Jewish.

It is a heartfelt and occasionally beautiful book. Here’s an example of two simple sentences that paint vivid, striking pictures in the mind’s eye:

The sea was restless and green, the green of vegetation; the sky had the exaggerated translucency of a precious stone.

And:

The signora was embroidering a tablecloth, which draped itself in long folds down from her knees. She looked like a Renaissance Madonna on a throne of clouds.

Finally, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is part of the author’s series of six interlocking books set in Ferrara — located between Venice and Bologna — which comprises the better-known The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), Within the Walls (1956), The Heron (1970), Behind the Door (1972) and The Smell of Hay (1972).

These have since been republished (and revised by the author before his death) in one volume known as The Novel of Ferrara, but I read the standalone ebook and have not read any of the others in the set… just yet.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, Fiction, HarperVia, historical fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, Viola Ardone, women in translation

‘The Children’s Train’ by Viola Ardone (translated by Clarissa Botsford)

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Fiction – paperback; HarperVia; 312 pages; 2021. Translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford.

Viola Ardone’s The Children’s Train is an absorbing novel about a young boy who escapes poverty and disease in war-torn Naples for a short time when he goes to live with a farming family in northern Italy.

Set in 1946, the narrative charts his antics before, during and after his six-month stint living with the kindly Benvenuti family and then fast forwards by almost 40 years to show the long-lasting impact of this experience on his life.

It’s a charming and heartfelt fictionalised account of Italy’s “happiness trains”, an initiative co-ordinated by a group of Communist women, to transport almost 70,000 children from the war-torn south to the north of the country. The “rescue mission” was designed to give those children a temporary reprieve from harsh and unsanitary living conditions following the impact of the Second World War and the families that welcomed them a sense of solidarity.

Maddalena Cerasuolo, an Italian partisan, war hero and Communist Party member, plays a starring role in the novel, helping to organise and register the children for the journey. 

Child narrator

The story is told through the eyes of seven-year-old Amerigo Speranza in the first person, present tense.

Amerigo is a clever, cheeky and talkative child, who lives in a one-room apartment in Naples. An older brother, whom he has never met, died in infancy. He’s never met his father either — he’s supposedly somewhere in America seeking his fortune. His mother, Antonietta, has a lover, who hides black-market coffee under their bed and is later taken away by police and thrown in jail.

To help his mother put food on the table, Amerigo scavenges rags to sell. He has an entrepreneurial spirit and catches rats in the sewers with his best friend Tommasino, painting them brown and white, and removing their tails so the rodents can be passed off as “hamsters” to sell in a local market.

His nickname is Nobel, because he’s clever, especially with numbers, and knows more than most children his age.

When he is sent to northern Italy on one of the first children’s trains to leave Naples, he’s not so sure it’s a good idea. Rumours are rife that Communists eat children and they’ll be cooked in ovens for consumption. There’s also a belief that the trains are a ploy by the Communists to send all the children to Russia, where they will be put to work in Siberia.

Train journey

But despite the fears, the journey is exciting because the children have never been on a train before. They’re issued with new clothes and shoes, fed delicious food and allowed to run amok. When they see snow for the first time through the train window one girl mistakes it for ricotta cheese.

“Amerigo, Ameri… wake up! There’s ricotta all over the ground. On the streets. On the mountains! It’s raining ricotta…”
The night is over and a pale ray of sunlight shines through the window.
“Mariù, it’s not cream or ricotta cheese. It’s snow…”
“Snow?”
“Frozen water.”
“Like the one Don Mimmi sells from his cart?”
“Kind of, but without the black-cherry syrup on top.”

When they arrive in Bologna, the children are collected by their foster families. Amerigo is housed with a young widow, Derna, who is gentle and compassionate, and claims she does not “really understand kids” because she doesn’t have any of her own. She gets her cousin, Rosa Benvenuti, who has three young boys and lives nearby, to look after him during the day (when she’s at work) because “kids need to be with kids”.

The arrangement is fortuitous. Rosa is friendly and maternal; her husband Alcide, a piano teacher, is kind; the three boys — Rivo, Luzio and baby Nario (Rivo-Luzio-Nario!) — are wary at first but soon accept Amerigo as a brother. In their company, Amerigo flourishes, both physically and mentally.

When he expresses an interest in music, in particular the violin, Alcide goes out of his way to secure him an instrument and the lessons to go with it, an opportunity his mother would never be able to provide.

The return back to Naples when the harsh winter is over is predictably a wrench, and Amerigo must readjust to a life in which he must forego basic needs in order to be with his mother, who is emotionally distant and detached.

Tale in four parts

The Children’s Train is comprised of four parts. The first three are set in 1946, covering Amerigo’s time living in Naples, his stint with the Benvenuti family up north, and then his return. The final part, set in 1994, gives us a glimpse of the adult Amerigo, who is coming to terms with decisions he made as a child and which have impacted his life — and his mother’s life — forever.

It’s a really lovely book with glimmers of humour and lashings of nostalgia and wistfulness.

The author, who is a school teacher by trade, has an uncanny ability to see things through a child’s eye. She captures the voice of a young boy perfectly — his youthful enthusiasm, fears and bravado, his sense of wonder and openness to new experiences, his growing awareness of right and wrong, and the class divide are all laid bare for the reader to see. I’m not always partial to child narrators, which can be wearisome and inauthentic, but Amerigo’s narrative is expertly done.

And while I knew exactly how this story was going to end and realised that I was being emotionally manipulated throughout, it’s such an immersive, big-hearted novel that it seems churlish to even point it out. The Children’s Train is an absorbing read, one with all the feels, and easily devoured over the course of a weekend. I adored it.

UPDATE 25 AUGUST: After writing this review, Italian historian Giovanni Rinaldi got in touch about the “happiness trains”. As part of an oral history project, between 2002 and 2020 he interviewed many Italians, now adults, who had been passengers. These have been collected into a book, sadly not available in English translation, called I Was There on That Train Too. A 52-minute documentary has also been made (see here) – with English subtitles — that is available to rent online or purchase. 

This is my 19th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it earlier this year while browsing in Dymocks Hay Street store, in Perth’s CBD. It chimed well with my then-burgeoning interest in Italy’s involvement in the Second World War. This book also qualifies for #WITMonth, which runs throughout August and encourages people to read books by women writers in translation.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, History, Iris Origo, Italy, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Pushkin Press, Setting

‘A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940’ and ‘War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1944’ by Iris Origo

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Non-fiction – paperback; Pushkin Press; 186 pages; 2018.

My fascination with Fascist Italy’s participation in the Second World War and the impact the conflict had on ordinary citizens continues with this compelling and highly readable two-volume set of war diaries by Iris Origo (1902-1988).

I had never heard of Iris Origo until I began to see these books pop up in my social media feeds earlier in the year. The diaries were published by both NYRB Classics and Pushkin Press in 2018, so I’m not sure why they have experienced a resurgence now, but I am so glad to have made their acquaintance, if somewhat belatedly.

But first, who was Iris Origo?

Portrait of a writer

The introductions to both these books, along with her Wikipedia entry, explain that she was an English-born biographer and writer who came from wealth and privilege — her father was a rich American diplomat and her mother the daughter of an Irish peer — but she had a peripatetic upbringing in England, Ireland, Italy and America.

After her father’s untimely death when Iris was eight years old, her mother settled in Italy and this is where Iris spent the rest of her childhood.

When she was 22, she married an Italian, Antonio Origo, and together they purchased a 2,800 hectare rundown estate, La Foce, in the Province of Sienna, and set about transforming it. During the Second World War, the couple housed refugee children at the estate as well as sheltering and feeding many escaped Allied prisoners of war and Italian partisans.

A talented writer, Iris became best known for War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1944, which was published in 1947 to great acclaim. That book, reviewed below, recounts her time at La Foce (which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site) during the war, the last years of Fascism and the liberation of Italy.

But an earlier diary, A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940, was not published during her lifetime. It’s a chilling account of how Italy stumbled into conflict in 1940.

In the afterword to the Pushkin Press edition, Katia Lysy, granddaughter of Iris Origo, writes that the manuscript was found hidden in her papers marked “unpublished”. She believes it was meant to be “a very private record in which Iris could give voice to thoughts and feelings she was usually forced to suppress” because to say such things aloud at the time might have landed her in hot water.

Chilling entries from the past

Published for the first time in 2017, A Chill in the Air is, indeed, chilling. It’s written reportage style without the benefit of hindsight which would allow the writer to contextualise events or to see the bigger picture. Instead, Origo provides a highly personal account of events happening around her, often via her impressive network of well-appointed contacts — her godfather was the American ambassador, for instance — giving us glimpses of multiple voices from political, cultural, religious and social circles.

Her granddaughter summarises it like this:

[…] A Chill in the Air reflects the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of a country on the brink of a war for which it is entirely unprepared. Iris Origo’s account of those years makes compelling reading. She pores over Italian newspapers and reflects poignantly on the changed attitude of her adopted country towards her beloved England, all the while holding our interest with an effortless flow of anecdotes, chilling wartime jokes and insider accounts of diplomatic negotiations doomed to failure.

The thing that strikes me most about reading this diary is that **I** know the outcome of events, but the writer, as she wrote the words, did not. Lines such as “terrible to think of what may lie ahead” (from 28 March 1939) and “the German advance on the Somme continues” (9 June 1939) and “All letters from England are a month old. What is happening? What can be happening?” (17 July 1940) seem alarming because history tells us what occurred.

The penultimate entry, written on 20 July 1940, before the writing of the diary was interrupted by the birth of Iris’s daughter on 1 August, is particularly chilling:

Last night Hitler’s speech. It is received here with almost universal approval: even those people who are not admirers of Naziism consider it a genuine effort towards peace and a last chance for England to save herself from destruction. That this destruction will be inevitable and will be swift, if Hitler does attempt it, no one doubts.

(This speech, in which Hitler offers the British an ultimatum — peace or destruction —  can be read in full online.)

 

Non-fiction – paperback; Pushkin Press; 320 pages; 2017.

War in Val d’Orcia covers the period 30 January 1943 to 5 July 1944 and feels more polished and more personal than the earlier diary. It is definitely more detailed and intricate.

It’s a well-written, first-hand personal account of a difficult time in Italy’s history but Iris Origo always brings a clear-eyed pragmatic view to everything she writes.  In the preface to this Pushkin Press edition, she claims that she tried to “avoid political bias and national prejudice” but acknowledges that she may well have “swallowed propaganda without realising it”.

Complex position

During 1943-1944, Italy’s involvement in the war is complex — and ever-changing. While the earlier diary covered the stage when Fascist leader Mussolini joined forces with Hitler, this diary charts changing circumstances. This includes the Allies landing in Sicily and bombing Rome, the Germans being driven out and Mussolini being arrested, heralding the fall of the Fascist regime.

As well as documenting the conflict — the looting, the bombing, the ever-present danger to Italian Jews and how the Fascist militia works hand in hand with the Nazis — Iris also gives us an insight into her own war efforts. Together with her Italian husband, Antonio Origo, the pair oversee more than 50 farms run by local peasants on their vast estate, producing the food required to sustain the nation. They open up La Foce to 32 refugee children, providing them with food and shelter, educating them and keeping them occupied while the war rages on.

Later, they secretly house escaped Allied prisoners of war (POW) and partisans who have taken up arms against the government. By doing this, both Iris and her husband are risking their lives for to help the enemy is a serious crime, punishable by death.

When the Italian armistice is called in September 1943, it looks like the war is over, but it’s really the beginning of the violence as the Nazis go on a rampage and POWs look to escape to places of safety. The diary does not shy away from describing some of this brutality.

Bombs were dropped in the valley this morning, shaking the house — aimed a the bridge on the Orcia. Then the bomber formation (thirty-six) flew over our heads and bombed Chiusi and the railway line. The explosions were loud even up here, and the children were frightened […] A lorry full of evacuees, all women and children, was hit at the Acquaviva crossing — twenty people wounded and eleven killed. (22 April 1944)

It doesn’t bode well when an airdrop by German planes announces that anyone hiding or helping the enemy will be shot on sight and that any house in which rebels are found will be blown up. Leaflets dropped by Allied planes announce the opposite.

The peasants read these leaflets with bewildered anxiety as to their own fate, and complete indifference (in most cases) to the main issue. Che sarà di noi? (What will become of us?) All that they want is peace — to get back to their land — and to save their sons. (21 May 1944)

Doing the right thing

I found this book not just a compelling and eye-opening read, tinged with sadness, enormous loss and grief, fear and violence, but a ringing endorsement of doing what is right and helping others in whatever way you can. The folly of war plays out against these pages yet Iris Origo, with all her wealth and privilege, does not seek the easy path, which would be to turn a blind eye. Instead, she courageously acts for the greater good.

What drives her to take the less selfless path is hard to know, but it may well have been the death of her son, who died of meningitis at the age of seven in 1933.

Reading A Chill in the Air and War in Val d’Orcia back to back was an intense and unforgettable experience.

For another take on these two diaries, please see Radz’s combined review at Rahika’s Reading Retreat. Jacqui of JacquiWine’s Journal has also reviewed A Chill in the Air and War in Val d’Orcia separately.

These are my 13th and 14th books for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I bought them earlier in the year after I kept seeing mention of them on Instagram.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, Daunt Books, Fiction, historical fiction, Italy, Natalia Ginzburg, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, war, women in translation

‘All Our Yesterdays’ by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Angus Davidson)

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Fiction – paperback; Daunt Books; 418 pages; 2022. Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson.

First published in 1952, Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays is a big-hearted and rambunctious tale chronicling the ups and downs of two Italian families during the Second World War and the events leading up to it.

It’s not an easy book to like — it’s so richly detailed as to be almost impenetrable, not helped by next to no paragraph breaks – but it is wholly immersive once you commit time to it and let the family dynamics and political dramas work their magic.

There’s no central character to steer you through the complexity of lives being lived, first under Fascist rule, then under German occupation, although the blurb on my edition claims it’s Anna, the quiet, teenage daughter of one of the families.

But it could just as easily be Cenzo Rena, the kindly, sociable, well-travelled man more than 30 years her senior, whom she marries to protect her reputation when she falls pregnant to the self-interested boy across the road. (That boy cruelly fobs her off with a 1,000-lire note to arrange an underground abortion, as if that will solve everything.)

Regardless, the narrative offers enough drama and intrigue to keep the reader turning the pages without a main protagonist.

A novel in two parts

The story is divided into two parts. The first sets the scene and introduces us to a vast cast of characters — two families who live across the street from one another in Northern Italy — and highlights how their secret work to oppose the Fascist regime in the 1930s unites them despite the disparity in their wealth (one family owns a soap factory, the other is headed by a middle-class widower with little disposable income).

They were talking politics in the sitting room, they were once again doing a dangerous, secret thing […] They wanted to overthrow the fascists, to begin a revolution. Her father had always said that the fascists must be overthrown, that he himself would be the first to mount the barricades, on the day of revolution. He used to say it would be the finest day of his life.

The second part focuses more on Anna and Cenzo’s marriage and charts what happens when 16-year-old Anna swaps her familial world for a new life in a new town with a man she barely knows.

Cenzo Rena told her they would get married at once, in a few days’ time, and then they would leave at once for his own village, he pulled out a map of Italy and showed her where his village was, far away where the South began. There the baby would be born and no one would ever know that the father of the baby was not himself, Cenzo Rena.

Later, when the Second World War arrives on their doorstep, Cenzo does his bit to help Jewish internees who are fleeing the North and hiding out in safer nondescript villages in the South. In fact, Cenzo is a rather influential figure in San Costanzo and has the ear of not just the local policeman but many of the contadini (peasants) who live nearby.

The personal and the political

This richly drawn novel manages to successfully show how family dynamics and the minutiae of daily life play out against a broader backdrop of political upheaval and uncertainty.

Ginzburg successfully shows how the Italians, confronted with war and its associated violence and food shortages, continued to live their lives as best they could. References to the German advancement across Europe, the fall of Mussolini and the rumours of Jewish persecution are mentioned almost in passing, but for the reader who has the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard not to feel the chilling hand of history.

All Our Yesterdays offers up a highly personalised view of war and its impact on ordinary people. My edition comes with an introduction by Sally Rooney, who describes it as a novel that does not turn “its face away from evil”:

Like any story of the Second World War, it tells of almost unendurable grief, loss, violence and injustice. But it is also a story about the possibility of what is right, and living by that knowledge, whatever the consequences.

For a far more eloquent review than mine, please see Jacqui’s review at JacquiWine’s Journal. Radz has also reviewed it at Radhika’s Reading Retreat.

This is my 11th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I purchased it in Readings Hawthorn on a sojourn to Melbourne in March of this year. I had previously read Ginzburg’s 1947 novella ‘The Dry Heart’ so was keen to read more of her work.

Author, Book review, Cesare Pavese, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin Classic, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, war

‘The House on the Hill’ by Cesare Pavese (translated by Tim Parks)

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Fiction – paperback; Penguin Classics; 176 pages; 2021. Translated from the Italian by Tim Parks.

First published in 1948, Cesare Pavese’s novella The House on the Hill, which is set in Italy during the Second World War, makes a perfect companion read to Dominic Smith’s Return to Valetto.

Said to be based on the author’s own wartime experiences, it recounts the tale of a school teacher who falls in with a group of anti-fascists but can’t quite commit to their cause because he’d rather lead a quiet life.

The book explores notions of self-preservation versus altruism and examines the concept of collective moral responsibility in the face of war.

Safe on the hill

Set in and around Turin, in 1943, during a time of immense political upheaval, it shows how the Italian people, living under a Fascist regime aligned with Nazi Germany, tried to continue their normal day-to-day activities while their evenings were beset by the terror of bombs and fires.

It is against this backdrop that Corrado, a young unmarried man, lives his life, teaching in a school by day and escaping to a house on the hill at night. He rents a room in the house, occupied by two live-in landladies and their dog, and occasionally feels guilty for “escaping the sirens every evening, hiding away in a cool room, stretched out on my bed in safety”.

When he returns to the unscathed school every morning, he is never sure which children will have died in the night-time air raids, but seems immune to their plight, dismissing it as just another symptom of war:

We’d all become inured to terrible events, found them banal, ordinary, disagreeable. Those who took them seriously and said, ‘That’s war,’ were even worse, dreamers, morons.

Meeting the partisans

It is from the vantage point on the hill that he can often hear laughter and frivolity rising up from the valley, and when he traces those sounds he comes across a group of local partisans, who gather to drink and sing in a house-turned-tavern every night.

He joins them socially when he realises an old flame, Cate, is part of the group but stops short of signing up to their movement.

She [Cate] walked a few steps with me, then stopped.
‘You’re not a Fascist, I hope?’
She was serious and laughed. I took her hand and protested. ‘We’re all Fascists, Cate dear,’ I said softly. ‘If we weren’t, we’d be rebelling, chucking grenades, risking our necks. Anyone who lets be and puts up with it is a Fascist.’
‘Not true,’ she said. ‘We’re waiting for the right moment. When the war is over.’

Later, when Fascist leader Benito Mussolini is disposed and imprisoned and the Germans begin occupying Italian territory, a new era of violence is ushered in. Corrado must make an important decision: should he take up arms and join the partisans, or keep his head below the parapet and continue living his relatively stable and uninterrupted life where he has a roof over his head and food on the table every day?

The book charts what happens next, and it’s not quite as straightforward as Corrado might have imagined.

Countryside charm

Alongside this exploration of human weakness and raw doubt, all beautifully translated by Tim Parks, Pavese uses the Italian countryside as a metaphor for life continuing on regardless of human history. His descriptions of the timeless landscape, its plants and the changing seasons are vivid and cinematic.

I walked in the sunshine, on the wooded slopes. Behind le Fontaine there were vineyards and fields with crops, and I were there often, to gather herbs and mosses in sheltered little glades, an old hobby from when I’d studied natural sciences. I always preferred ploughed fields to houses and gardens, and the edges of the fields where the wild takes over.

Told in a self-reflective, self-aware and often resigned voice, The House on the Hill gives us a glimpse of one man’s moral uncertainty and indecision at a time of great violence and political uncertainty.

The way Corrado rationalises his choices and tries to remain uninvolved is honest and insightful. Until we are put in those same situations, how does anyone know how they will react?

This is a real literary gem, and one I am pleased to have discovered.

Finally, the beautiful cover image of this Penguin Classic edition of the book is by Italian artist Mario Borgoni (1869-1936) from a 1927 travel and advertising poster of Merano.

Author, Book review, Elena Ferrante, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Text, translated fiction, women in translation

‘Troubling Love’ by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

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Fiction – paperback; Text Publishing; 139 pages; 2006. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.

Reading Elena Ferrante’s debut novel Troubling Love is like stumbling into a dark, oppressive world of mother-daughter relationships, misogyny, domestic violence and grief.

Sometimes it’s hard to know which way is up because the story melds past and present so effectively. And the daughter — 45-year-old Delia — who narrates the tale looks so much like her mother that she often imagines they are one and the same person.

The book, which was first published in 1999, opens in dramatic style:

My mother drowned on the night of May 23rd, my birthday, in the sea at a place called Spaccavento, a few miles from Minturno. […] My mother had taken the train for Rome two days earlier, on May 21st, and never arrived.

This gritty, detective-like tale is told from Delia’s perspective. She’s an independent woman who lives in Naples and makes her living as a comic strip artist. The eldest of three daughters, she has little to do with her younger sisters, who are married and busy with their own lives in different cities, and is estranged from her father who had been separated from her mother for more than 20 years.

The Europa edition, published in 2022

When she gets news of her mother’s death, she begins a quest to discover what happened. She wonders whether she had succumbed to foul play or died accidentally or by her own hand. The first clue is a bewildering phone call that her mother made on the night she was supposed to be in Rome:

My mother [Amalia] said in a calm voice that she couldn’t tell me anything: there was a man with her who was preventing her. Then she started laughing and hung up.

As Delia traces her mother’s last known movements, she’s drawn into the most intimate aspects of Amalia’s life. Why was she wearing an elegant new bra (and nothing else) when her body was found? Why is all her old tattered and mended underwear in a half-full garbage bag in her bathroom? Why is there a man’s smart blue dress shirt in her bedroom? And who was the man she was referring to when she made that call?

To determine the answers to these questions Delia embarks on a journey through the claustrophobic streets of Naples and into her mother’s unhappy past. Along the way, she’s forced to confront her own painful childhood in which she regularly saw her father beat up her mother, where his need for coercive control made her dress shabbily “to placate the jealousy of my father” and where he often accused her of dalliances that never occurred.

A bleak world

The book treads some dark territory, highlighting how women cannot be their authentic selves when living in a violent, patriarchal society, and most of the male characters are ugly, menacing and deeply misogynistic. Sometimes it feels heavy-handed, almost as if everyone in the story is a caricature — even Delia seems unknowable.

But the cinematic force of the prose pulls the reader along into a bleak world where separating facts from lies becomes increasingly more difficult. Are Delia’s recollections of the past reliable, for instance, and how can a child possibly know every aspect of a parent’s adult life?

There’s a dark secret at the heart of Troubling Love that comes like a sucker punch to the stomach, making this a truly memorable and astonishingly powerful first novel.