The Betrothed: a Seventeenth-Century Milanese Story Discovered and Rewritten / by Alessandro Manzoni- first published in the Italian in three volumes from 1825 to 1827 - translated by Michael F. Moore- preface by Jhumpa Lahiri.- 2022- 665 Pages

The Betrothed: a Seventeenth-Century Milanese Story Discovered and Rewritten / by Alessandro Manzoni- first published in the Italian in three volumes from 1825 to 

1827 - translated by Michael F. Moore- preface by Jhumpa Lahiri.- 2022- 665 Pages

Alessandro Manzoni-1785 to 1873 - Milan

"I look forward to Manzoni’s The Betrothed reaching and conquering new readers in the English language and to teaching Manzoni to my students again. The timing is ideal. More than ever, we need the grand, reassuring architecture of a novel from the 1800s—which in its own time shed light on the early 1600s—to give us perspective on some of the most tumultuous, troubling, and pressing matters that still pertain to our twenty-first-century world: plague, those who deny scientific evidence of the plague, migration, refugee crises, hunger, foreign occupation, religious hypocrisy, tyranny, corruption, mob mentality, existential anguish, class warfare, incarceration, 1600s—to give us perspective on some of the most tumultuous, troubling, and pressing matters that still pertain to our twenty-first-century world: plague, those who deny scientific evidence of the plague, migration, refugee crises, hunger, foreign occupation, religious hypocrisy, tyranny, corruption, mob mentality, existential anguish, class warfare, incarceration, identity politics, privacy violations, the abduction and silencing of women, and the rights of two people who love each other to be married under the law. Manzoni’s novel—both emotionally gripping and coolly objective, both extremely spirited and deadly serious—will enthrall you and sober you in turns." From The Preface by Jhumpa Lahiri 

Jhumpa Lahiri, as I knew she would, has elegantly accounted for the reasons we should be grateful to Michael F. Moore for opening up Manzoni's masterwork to Anglophone readers. This should be high on serious readers of the 19th Century European novel to be read list.

The unifying theme of The Betrothed is the relationship between Renzo and Lucia, two young lovers whose desire to marry is thwarted by a rich and powerful noble man who wants Lucia as a concubine. They are unable to find a Catholic priest willing to marry them out of fear of reprisal. The clergy, especially Capuchins, play a big part. Lucia is placed in a nunnery from which she escapes.

Milan, the capital of Lombardy in 1628 , is transformed into a necropolis, the dead pile up in the streets, food is very hard to get. (The novel takes place in 1628–30. During this period, the Duchy of Milan—whichencompassed large parts of what is today the Lombardy region—was under Spanish rule, and occupied a key geopolitical position within that empire. Its neighbor, the Republic of Venice, was a sovereign state, extending as far west as Bergamo,about thirty miles from Milan The Duchy was therefore under the Spanish king, Philip IV-from the Historical Background End Notes)

Anyone who is able leaves. Renzo is a skilled silk industry worker and is able to find work. The plague brings out the best in some, the worst in others.

The Betrothed very much follows the history of the period. Moore has included very extensive footnotes as well as an appendix detailing historical figures in the novel.

Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) is Italy’s most celebrated writer. His masterpiece, The Betrothed (I promessi sposi), created the modern Italian language and has influenced generations of the country’scountry’s writers and readers. In addition to this novel—written over a thirty-year period and in three distinct versions—he was a poet, playwright, and prolific essayist, writing on subjects ranging from history to language, literary theory, and religion. - from the book

Michael F. Moore’s published translations range from twentieth-century classics—Agostino by Alberto Moravia and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi—to contemporary novels, most recently Live Bait by Fabio Genovesi and Lost Words by Nicola Gardini. Moore is the former chair of the Advisory Board for the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. For many years he was also an interpreter at the United Nations, and a full-time staff member of the Permanent Mission of Italy to the UN.

Mel Ulm

Prevail: The Inspring Story of Ethiopia's Victory Over Mussolini's Invasion, 1935 to 1941 by Jeff Pearce (2014', 640 pages)

Prevail- The Inspiring Story of Ethiopia's Victory Over Mussolini's Invasion-1935 to 1941 by Jeff Pearce will fascinate anyone interested in World War Two history, especially in Africa, in Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, Italy's role in the war and those that love an inspiring true story meticulously researched and clearly narrated.  

Italy, as Pearce details, used a trumped up affront over an imagined insult by the Ethiopian government as an excuse to invade Ethiopia.  Mussolini wanted an easy victory to establish his credibility and expand his colonial Empire.  Pearce lets us see how this invasion caused outrage in large communities of African Americans, especially in Harlem.  Pearce lets us see how the war created animosity between Italians Americans and African Americans.  Many Americans wanted to go to Ethiopia to join the war.  There was quite a cast of characters, from heroes to charlatans, from America who got involved.  

The Italians were using machine guns, airplanes, mustard gas as well as troops from their African possessions to fight the Ethiopians, often armed only with near Stone Age weapons.  Pearce lets us see the great courage of the Ethiopian troops.  I learned how things worked in the Ethiopian government, very much centered on the Emperor. The British foreign office at first seemed to promise help but did not follow through. Pearce attributes some of this to the racist views of Churchill.  At the start of the war America was pursuing an isolationist policy.  

Even after the Italians, who bombed intentionally hospitals and attacked unarmed groups of civilians with deadly mustard gas, the Ethiopians kept fighting on through it all.  There are lots of colorful characters, from Ethiopian generals, Americans flying for the very weakly equipped Ethiopian air force, British officials to ordinary Ethiopian citizens.  

This is very good work of popular history.  I strongly endorse it for all those who are interested in the subject matter.  I can see it as must Reading among WW Two history buffs, I suspect even they will learn a lot from this book.

Jeff Pearce has worked as a talk show host, a magazine editor in London's famous "City" district, and a journalism instructor in Myanmar. He is the author of several novels published in the United States and the United Kingdom under pseudonyms and under his own name. He has also written several books on history and current affairs. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Mel u

"Maria" - A Short Story by Dacia Maraini (1963, in Translation 1989)

Information on Women in Translation Month

Works I have read so far for Women In Translation Month - August, 2017

1.  "Happy New Year" by Ajaat Cour - Translated from Punjabi
2. "The Floating Forest" by Natsuo Kirino- Translated from Japanese
3. " A Home Near the Sea" by Kamala Das - Translated from Malayalam
4. "Maria" by Dacia Maraini- Translated from Italian



"Maria", translated by Martha King, is a very moving deftly done story that in just a few pages shows us the prejudices faced by a lesbian couple in Italy in the early 1960 while making us feel they are anchored in particularized reality.

Maria is still sleeping when the narrator quietly slips out of bed to go to her office job at an automobile factory.  The noise at the job is so loud she has to shout to speak to other office workers.  In just a few paragraphs we come to understand her very harsh work environment, we feel her eyes lingering on a young factory woman whose legs remind her of Maria.  When she returns home the apartment is a total mess.  In these beautiful lines we can feel the power of Maraini in her rendering of Maria's thoughts on their then socially unacceptable relationship:

"Maria has a very nice voice. Sometimes, while I wash, clean, put the house in order, she sits on a stool in the bedroom next to the window so she can get the sun on her back, and she talks to me like I wasn’t there. Often I can’t even follow her reasoning, which is deep and complicated, but I lose myself in her voice, which is clear and light and musical like a bird’s. We eat in the kitchen. Maria sits across from me and greedily eats everything I put on her plate. But she doesn’t look at what she eats, because she is thinking; then her face acquires that distracted and worried look so familiar to me. “Have you ever thought what love is between two women?” “No.” “There must be a reason, don’t you think?”   “Why should I love you instead of a man? Why should I make love to you instead of a man?” “I don’t know. Because you like to.” “But why do I like to?” “I don’t know. Because you love me.” “Oh, fine, you fool. But why?” “I really don’t know.” “I think that men and women don’t want to make love together any more so they won’t make children. There are too many of us.” “Do you want some more cod?” She nods yes. She brings to her mouth a big piece of cod –the most economical kind and therefore fatter and more thready –without paying any attention to its taste."

As was very common in Italy in the time, Maria is very left wing.  She lectures the narrator about how her bosses are getting rich from her work.

Normally I'm disinclined to tell the close of the stories upon which I post but as this story cannot be read online and the ending is so powerful I will proceed.

Maria's ultra conservative father, a farmer, has her locked up in a mental hospital because of her sexuality.  We feel the great sadness and pain of the narrator as she goes about the now empty routine of her existence.  After a week she takes a bus ride to the mental hospital:

"A week later I return to visit her. They tell me she has gone away. I’m happy and get ready to go back home when a fat blond girl comes up to tell me that Maria has killed herself. Immediately after she bursts into a gloomy, stupid laugh. I don’t know whether to believe her or not. Then, when the sister takes her by the wrist and drags her away screaming, I know that it’s true."



I read this story in anthology perfect for Women in Translation Month, New Italian: A Collection of Short Fiction, edited and introduced by Martha King.


Dacia Maraini

Born
in Fiesole, Tuscany, Italy
November 13, 1936

Dacia Maraini is an Italian writer. She is the daughter of Sicilian Princess Topazia Alliata di Salaparuta, an artist and art dealer, and of Fosco Maraini, a Florentine ethnologist and mountaineer of mixed Ticinese, English and Polish background who wrote in particular on Tibet and Japan. Maraini's work focuses on women’s issues, and she has written numerous plays and novels.

Alberto Moravia was her partner from 1962 until 1983.

Mel u

All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg (1952)

My Post on "The Mother" by Natalia Ginzburg

All my Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg is set in a small Italian village during World War Two.  It focuses on two families, brought together by passions, intrigue and the shared hardships of the war years.  It focuses on the small details of the characters lives.  At first they are proud of the success of Germany, their ally, in the war but as the war drags on and as they see the horrible impact of the war, they grow weary.

This is a short post, just mood I am in.  I bought a kindle of this novel on sale for $1.95, it is now back up to $9.95.  I enjoyed it but not enough to suggest to those I do not know that it is worth the full price.  

Natalia Ginzburg was born in Palermo, Italy in 1916. She was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories, and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. Modest and intensely reserved, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history, whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside, or contemporary Rome—all the while approaching those traumas only indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and United States. She wrote acclaimed translations of both Proust and Flaubert into Italian. She died in Rome in 1991.. from goodreads 

History A Novel by Elsa Morante (1974, translated by William Weaver,1977, 720 pages)

I offer my great thanks to Max u for the Amazon Gift Card that allowed me to read this book

History A Novel by Elsa Morante is a fascinating look at life in Rome during World War Two and up to 1947.  Thecentral characters are a mother and her son.  A German soldier on his way to North Africs raped her, fell in love, then left her pregnant and he was never heard from again.  Ida, a teacher does all she can to get her and her son through the terrible war years.  Rome goes through terrible times.  We witness bombing raids, see the norms of morality erode while some rise to heroic actions.

There are lots and lots of interesting minor characters, exciting plot turns.  I as some how really moved when an older lady who feeds stray cats says she notices as the war gets worse that fewer cats come for her food.

At the start of each chapter there are headlines about world events, mostly on the war in Europe . 

This novel was a huge best seller in Italy.  I am glad I read this book.

                                      1912 to 1985, Rome 

Mel u

Woman of Rome A Life of Elsa Morante by Lilly Tuck

Literary biographies are one of my favorite reading areas.  It seems the 21th century is getting off to a great start with lots of wonderfully researched and elegantly written biographies of authors in the last few years.  Woman of Rome A Life of Elsa Morante by Lilly Tuck exemplifies this.  The author of a biography of a famous author  has a difficult task.  The temptation is to use the life history of the subject as resulting in her works, to,identifying characters in an author's work with real people in her life. 

Elsa Morante (1912 to 1985) most highly regarded novels are History and the cult classic, Arturo's Island.  She published lots of short stories, a good bit of political journalism, she was a communist as were most Italian writers and intellectuals of the period.  She married in 1941 the novelist Alberto Moravio, author of numerous novels including Woman of Rome, the source of the title for Tuck's biography.   She got her literary start publishing short stories.

Morante was born into a struggling to get by high drama family.  She learned early what it meant to be a woman of Rome.  She was not of the temperment or inclination to work in a mundane job, a shop or a factory were not of interest to her. Tuck tells us she occasionally prostituted herself, as did the central character in Woman of Rome.   From an early age she developed a love for reading.   Morante and her husband were both half-Jewish.  When the Germans   occupied Rome in 1943, they moved to a remote village in the mountains and stayed there until the war was over.  Tuck shows us how from this experience came Morante's very powerful History.  (I hope to read this in February.)  I was moved when Tuck explained how Morante insisted this book be priced so as to make it affordable by as many people as possible.  The well known translator William Weaver helped produce an English language edition.   

Tuck devotes a lot of space to commentary on the novels of Morante, showing how her life experiences influenced  her work.  Morante's marriage was not a great match.  They were not at all a conventional literary couple.  Both had other relationships.  They divorced in 1961.  Morante liked handsome, artistic, sometimes bisexual men years younger than herself and Tuck elegantly describes her various relationships.  

Morante loved cats, especially Siamese cats, at times seemingly preferring them to people, an attitude I sometimes share.

"Animals are angels and Siamese cats are archangels" - Elsa Morante

I enjoyed this book a lot.  Morganite had a very interesting life and Tuck takes us along.

Mel u

The Skin by Curzio Malaparte. (1949). A Second Reading

When I read The Skin,in September of 2013,  Curzio Malaparte I finished it completely stunned and drained.  I knew I had encountered a great work of art that certainly transcended my ability to begin to deal with on first encounter.  I just finished my second reading and have of scheduled for a third next year.

Below the cover images is my post from Seotember 2013. 

New thoughts

 I was much more impressed and amazed by the book on second reading.  I think readers of the novel will be divided between those who abandon it after twenty pages or so, those who get off on the squalor and whorishness of Naples in World War Two right after the Americans arrive and those are stunned by the power of the work.  It is for sure high art, cruelly so.  It wonderfully describes the total degradation of Naples by the war but beyond this it is a story of Europe versus America, Cartesian Logic versus the irrationality and barbarity of life in Europe.  Malaparte is in touch with old chaotic forces, he loves  death, decay, corruption.  As I read on in The Skin I feel like I am being assaulted by a force I can barely understand.  

Some say it is one of the greatest of World War Two novels and I accept this.  I think when you first begin to read it you will say ok this is a powerful city ruined by war book, and you will be right.  As and if you go on and give yourself over to tne book, you may have one of the greatest reading experiences of your life.  

One reading for sure is not enough.

The Skin is a very complex, dark, strange work of art.  It is set in Naples in 1943, the American Army has just taken Sicily from the Nazis.   The Skin combines the cultural depth of Ford Madox Ford, the seen it all veneer of decayed aristocracy of Gregor Von Rezzori, with depth of Joseph Roth.  I have thought and thought about what I might say about The Skin.  I can come up with nothing more than to say I hope to read this work once a year for the rest of my reading life.  

Curzio Malaparte (pseudonym of Kurt Eric Suckert, 1898–1957) was born in Prato, Italy, and served in World War I. An early supporter of the Italian Fascist movement and a prolific journalist, Malaparte soon established himself as an outspoken public figure. In 1931 he incurred Mussolini’s displeasure by publishing a how-to manual entitled Technique of the Coup-d’Etat, which led to his arrest and a brief term in prison. During World War II Malaparte worked as a correspondent, for much of the time on the eastern front, and this experience provided the basis for his two most famous books, Kaputt (1944; available as an NYRB classic) and The Skin (1949). His political sympathies veered to the left after the war. He continued to write, while also involving himself in the theater and the cinema. New York Review of Books.  

This work was translated by David Moore in 2012.  Prior translations were heavily bowdlerized.  There is an insightful introduction by Rachel Kushner, the author of Flamethowers. 

Here is the publisher's description:

This is the first unexpurgated English edition of Curzio Malaparte’s legendary work The Skin. The book begins in 1943, with Allied forces cementing their grip on the devastated city of Naples. The sometime Fascist and ever-resourceful Curzio Malaparte is working with the Americans as a liaison officer. He looks after Colonel Jack Hamilton, “a Christian gentleman … an American in the noblest sense of the word,” who speaks French and cites the classics and holds his nose as the two men tour the squalid streets of a city in ruins where liberation is only another word for desperation. Veterans of the disbanded Italian army beg for work. A rare specimen from the city’s famous aquarium is served up at a ceremonial dinner for high-ranking Allied officers. Prostitution is rampant. The smell of death is everywhere.

Subtle, cynical, evasive, manipulative, unnerving, always astonishing, Malaparte is a supreme artist of the unreliable, both the product and the prophet of a world gone rotten to the core.

The Skin is the NYRB Classics Book Club selection for November 2013.

Mel u

The Truce by Primo Levi (1963, translated by Anna Goldstein)

The Complete Works of Primo Levi is an act that transfigures publishing into conscience at its most sublime.” — Cynthia Ozick

I salute Liveright Publishing, a division of Norton and Company, for having the moral vision to publish (forthcoming September 2015) The Complete Works of Primo Levi.  At 3008 pages, it is of major service to the Anglophone literary universe.  Containing fourteen novels, numerous essays and short stories as well as excellent introductory articles and many brand new and never translated works. I think many will one day consider this three volume set as among their most treasured literary possessions.  People will  pass down this collection to their descendants.  

The best known work in the collection is his memoir of his year in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man.  Recently  I read a beautiful beyond my ability to praise novel by Iréne Némirovsky, Suite Francaise.  I felt great sadness and shame at the human condition when I learned she died in Auschwitz in 1942.  I see the Holocaust, in part, as a war on a culture and a people as dedicated to the reading life as ever existed.  

Primo Levi was sent to Auschwitz on Febuary 21, 1944, arrested for his membership in an Italian anti-fascist organization.  He was there until the Russians liberated the camp on January 18, 1945.  If This is a Man is his memoir of that time.   The Truce is about his experiences when Auschwitz was liberated and his journey back to his home in Turin, Italy.  

Few will,read the Truce before reading If This is a Man.  It is an amazing account of Levi's experiences when Auschwitz was liberated.  There was a great sense of chaos and people did not know they were really no longer under the control of the Nazis for several days.  Of course many ex-camp inmates are terribly sick but everyone wants to get home, even though in many cases their home areas have been totally ravavaged in the war. 

We go along on the trip back home, mostly in packed railroad cars under Russian supervision.  

Of course the trip is very hard but the will to survive and the elation of being free drives Levii on.  There are all sorts of people on the trains, a babel of languages and cultures.  The search for food is paramount. 

Levi calls this work a novel but it reads as a memoir.  This work and If This is a Man are lasting tributes to the human spirit.  I hope no one ever has to write books like these again.  

I was kindly given a copy of this collection by the publisher. 

Mel u

Número Zero by Umberto Eco (2015, translated by Richard Dixon)

http://www.umbertoeco.com/

Posts on Umberto Eco

A post by Ambrosia Boussweau 

European Correspondent, The Reading Life

It has been five years since I read a novel by Umberto Eco (1932, Italy).  I first read his The Name of the Rose and then The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.  Both of these works are highly regarded works of art.  Of the two my favorite is The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, about an antique book dealer.  These are challenging works that required serious attention.  

Número Zero, published in Italy in 2012 and a best seller there, is forthcoming in an English translation in November this year.  I was very kindly given an advance review copy.  

Numero Zero is set in Milan in 1992. The center of the story is a start up newspaper.  One of, perhaps the main, character is a writer who needs a job so he accepts an offer.  The work has a strongly noir feel in the shady world of Italian gossip and political scandal journalism.  We meet the several people recruited to work on the new newspaper.  Each person comes with their own baggage.  

The lead character is offered a big bonus to write an article in which he asserts that contrary to everything in the history books, Mussolini was not killed in 1945.  The person killed was Musolini's double.  We learn of various right wing plots to bring the real Mussolini back, in the story being pushed he was able to escape to Argentina with the help of the Vatican.   The writing of this story and his confusion over the possible truth and motivations behind it begins to take over the reporter's life.  

I am glad I was able to read this book.  It is only 208 pages and I find the Amazon prepurchase prize for a Kindle edition, $13.95, too high.  

This is a book for those eagerly awaiting anything new by the author, not for Eco neophytes.

If This is a Man by Primo Levi (1947, translated by Stuart Woolf, also published as Survival in Auschwitz)

"The Complete Works of Primo Levi is an act that transfigures publishing into conscience at its most sublime.” — Cynthia Ozick

I salute Liveright Publishing, a division of Norton and Company, for having the moral vision to publish (forthcoming September 2015) The Complete Works of Primo Levi.  At 3008 pages, it is of major service to the Anglophone literary universe.  Containing fourteen novels, numerous essays and short stories as well as excellent introductory articles and many brand new and never translated works I think many will one day consider this three volume set as among their most treasured literary possessions.  People will  pass down this collection to their descendants.  

The best known work in the collection is his memoir of his year in Auschwitz, If This Is aMan.  Just last week I read a beautiful beyond my ability to praise novel by Iréne Némirovsky, Suite Francaise.  I felt great sadness and shame at the human condition when I learned she died in Auschwitz in 1942.  I see the Holocaust, in part, as a war on a culture and a people as dedicated to the reading life as ever existed.  

Primo Levi was sent to Auschwitz on Febuary 21, 1944, arrested for his membership in an Italian anti-fascist organization.  He was there until the Russians liberated the camp on January 18, 1945.  If This is a Man is his memoir of that time.  The average life expectancy on entering Auschwitz was three months.  There were people who survived more than three years.  (Iréne Némirovsky was classified as a worthless to the Germans person and was sent to the gas chambers after only two days.)

The Germans made the common criminals in the camp the leaders, the "Kapos".  In the camp people did not simply see themselves as Jews but as Italian, French, Polish, Russia.  The camp also housed English prisoners of war.  An experienced inmate could tell from another's number where they were from and how long they had been there.  Levi brilliantly shows us how life was organized in the camp.  Much of it is not easy to read.  We learn how some were able to survive for years in the camp and why some were recognized as having no chance by experienced residents.  One of the things survivors learned to profit from was the stupidity of the Germans working in the camp.  If you had a professional skill such as a doctor, engineer, carpenter, classical musician, chemist (as was Levj), if you spoke German or were an attractive homosexual, per Levi, your chances of survival went way up.  A lot of it was just how strong your will to live was.  Getting food and clothes, especially good shoes, were of all importance.  It was wonderful to see how many inmates kept their basic human decency in this enviorment.  Levi wonderful brings to life a number of inmates.  The most dreaded occasion was "selection day".  The camp authorities were periodically ordered to send to the gas chambers a fixed number of their captives based on projected incoming volume of new arrivals.  On one day Levi describes, seven percent were selected.

We are there when the camp is liberated by the Russians.  A myth of holocaust thought is that these were occasions for great rejoicing. This is based on staged newsreel productions.  In truth most captives were in too poor health to even fully understand what had happened.  In the case of Auschwitz, most Germans simply left.  The inmates knew at some point the end was near for the Germans and their was a fear, as had happened elsewhere, that the Germans would slaughter them all.  

I was very kindly given a review copy of this collection.  I will next read his Truce, an account of his trip back to Italy after leaving the camp.  Maybe I will never read all 3008 pages but now I can.

Mel u

The Last Leopard A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi dí Lampedosa by David Gilmour (1988)

I offer my great thanks to Max u for the Amazon Gift Card that allowed me to read this book

My Posts on Giuseppe Tomasi dí Lampedosa

Giuseppe Tomasi dí Lampedosa (1896 to 1957, Sicily) is the author of what many consider the greatest of all Italian novels, The Leopard.  Set in Sicily in the 19th century, it focuses on a nobleman who see his way of life being destroyed by social changes, historical forces he cannot control.  It focuses on the decline of a decadent aristocracy.  

I am very fond of biographies of authors and this is up there with the best of them.  Lampedosa was a minor nobleman from a family of ancient lineage.  For generations the Lampedosa's lived upon the rents from their properties.  Gilmour does a marvelous job of letting us see how the family background shaped the mind set of Lampedoda.  I don't quite know how to talk about this book but I loved it, especially the extensive details given about the reading life of Lampedosa, who loved nothing more than reading.   He treasured physical books, he kept a copy of his favorite book, The Pickwick Papers by his bed and carried an edition of Shakespeare with him when ever he traveled.  He loved being in his library above all.  Lampedosa was an inward directed man.  He married a Ukrainian psychoanalysis with  whom he had a sometimes long distance relationship.  He was a man of very deep culture, erudition and historically very learned. Gilmour says he looked like and acted like an old man by the time he was fifty, perhaps weighed down the decline of his beloved Sicily.  After World War Two Lampedosa felt obligated to help with the post war rebuilding of the island and took an administrative job with the Italian Red Cross.  He soon became Red Cross director for Sicily and was subsequently asked to resign when too many complaints were raised about how things were going.  I got the feeling it was not really Lampedosa's fault, it was just not a job for him.  A lot of space is devoted to the composition of his only novel, The Leopard and his inability to get it published.  After posthumous publication, it went on to become one of the bestselling and highest regarded Italian novels of all time.

David Gilmour’s books include award-winning biographies of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Curzon. He is also the author of The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj and of several books on Spain and the Middle East. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, he is a contributor to the Spectator and the New York Review of Books. He is currently writing a book on Giuseppe Verdi and the unification of Italy. The Last Leopard won the Marsh Biography Award in 1989.

I would certainly want to read more by Gilmour.  

I will reread The Leopard soon and will be helped by the insights of Gilmour.

Mel u

"The Blind Kittens" by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1961, translated by Stephen Tilley, 2014)

My Post on The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The Blind Kittens was the first chapter in a never completed second novel.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896 to 1957, Sicily) is remembered for his classic novel, The Leopard. Reading this wonderful book is as close as we can get to time-traveling to 19th century Sicily.  His literary output was sadly very small, consisting of his novel and three short works of fiction.  I have previously posted on his magnificent story "The Professor and the Siren" which I totally loved.  "The Blind Kittens" is included in the same collection.  Like all his work, it is set in Sicily.  If you are at all interested in the history of Sicily, you will be fascinated by "The Blind Kittens".

"The Blind Kittens" is about the economic life of Sicily how land ownership and money lending dominated the island.  The influence of Balzac can be strongly felt here.  We see how one family slowly acquired more and more land.  I loved the descriptions of the food. 

"she offered sicilian cuisine raised to another level —to its cube, in fact—in terms of the number of `portions and the abundance of sauces, thus rendering it lethal. The macaroni veritably swam in oil, buried under a mass of caciocavallo cheese; the meats were stuffed with fiery salami; the “trifle-in-a-hurry” contained three times the prescribed amount of liqueur, sugar, and candied fruit. But all this, as previously said, seemed to ferrara exquisite, the pinnacle of cuisine"

Lampedusa's descriptions of life in Sicily are just exquisite.  His work is part of a deeply cultured tradition.  He was an extreme devotee of the reading life.

I highly recommend Marina Warner's introduction to the collection, which can be read online on The Paris Review webpage in a slightly different form.   Warner helped me understand the mythology behind his work. 

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/08/09/the-professor-and-the-siren/

I hope to reread The Leopard in June.

Mel u

Sicily An Island at the Crossroads of History by John Julius Norwich (2015, forthcoming)

Long ago I read John Julius Norwich's trilogy on the Byzantium Empire.  I was happy to be provided the opportunity to read and post on his latest and what he says will probably be his last book, Sicily An Island at the Crossroads of History.  I would say I was disappointed in this book and in some of the  prejudices of Norwich against what he calls "orientals".  I was shocked to read these lines 

"he was an oriental through and through. His life was more like a Sultan’s than a King’s, and his character embodied that same combination of sensuality and fatalism that has stamped so many eastern rulers. He never took a decision if he could avoid it, never tackled a problem if there was the faintest chance that, given long enough, it might solve itself. Once goaded into action, however, he would pursue his objectives with ferocious, even demonic, energy."

There are numerous such  passages, some worse than this, to be found. 

This attitude to me tainted the book badly.   He also numerous times suggests "fair haired, light skin rulers" we're loved for their good looks over "darker" rulers.  

This is pretty much just a history of who ruled the island.  You will leave it with no sense of how the citizens of the island, even the rulers, lived their lives, what they ate, wore, etc.  

For most I would say just read the Wikepedia articles on Sicily and save your $32.00 for something else.

Mel u

The Conformist by Alberto Moravio (1951, translated by Tami Calliope)

I offer my great thanks to Max u for the gift card which allowed me to read this book. 

My Prior Posts on Alberto Moravio

Last year I read and posted on two works by Alberto Moravio, Augustino a very well done novella centering on a preadolescent boy's reaction to his mother's seeming affair with a man at the resort at which they are staying and a novel I really enjoyed, A Woman of Rome, about prostitute. Recently  I received a publicity notice from Amazon saying the Kindle edition of his novel The Conformist is temporarily reduced in price from $11.95 to $1.95, providing me with the opportunity to read another work by Moravio.  

The Conformist, narrated in the first person, begins in Italy some where in the 1920s.  In a complex way, the novel is a commentary on the psychological need to appear "normal" and how this lead the narrator, and by proxy Italy, into a support for fascism.  The story line is fast moving and keeps you interested with regular shocking events.  We first meet the narrator at about age thirteen.  He encounters a man working as a chauffeur, a defrocked priest, who lures him to his employer's house with the promise he will give him a gun, something he badly wants.  The man, the boy suspected something was wrong but he really wanted the gun, attempted to force the boy into sex.  A violent event results from this.  I think we can perhaps take this as showing us the sexuality inherent in the submission to fascism, to a cult of the machismo leader.  

In the next segment the narrator is on his twenties, he wants most of all to see himself and be seen as others as conforming to the norms of society.  He has a dark secret he can never reveal.   He works as a secret agent for the fascist government.  He has a lovely fiancé any man would be proud to have.  As far as he knows she is at 21 still a virgin.  In a very shocking powerful development we learn that she also is keeping a very dark secret, one I never saw coming.  The narrator tries to conform to how a fiancé should act.  He plans a honeymoon in Paris and is given a sinister assignment by the fascist secret police which leads to at least two more very interesting surprising turns.  

I have not told much of the plot as I don't want to spoil the real enjoyment the plot provides.  It is also an acute psychological account of the drive to conformity. We are also see how the end of the war in Italy impacted society and the narrator with a final terrible twist of fate.  There are also well done sex scenes and detailed descriptions of the body of the narrator's fiancé I enjoyed reading. 

I greatly enjoyed The Conformist and hope to read more Moravia.

 

Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) was one of Italy’s greatest twentieth-century writers. Among his best-known books to have appeared in English are Boredom, The Woman of Rome, The Conformist (the basis for Bernardo Bertolucci’s film), Roman Tales, Contempt (the basis for Jean-Luc Godard’s film), and Two Women.  From The New York Review of Books webpage.

Mel u

Luigi Pirandello - Two Short Stories by a Nobel Laureate

"With Other Eyes"

"Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, her Son in Law"

I was recently kindly given an advance review copy of a forthcoming anthology of short stories by diverse authors, 100 Great Short Stories edited and introduced by James Daley.  Included in the anthology were two short stories by the 1934 Nobel Prize Winner, Luigi Pirandello, a writer I have not yet read.  

There is no date of publication or translation information in the collection, my best guess is they were written between 1922 to 1933 and were likely translated by Stanley Applebaum. (If you have information on this please leave a comment.)

Both stories are very good and both center partially on a dead wife.  I will just post briefly on the stories.  I could not find them online in English.  

"Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, her Son-in-Law" is a very funny quite intriguing story set in a small town in Italy.  There is a big debate in the town over whether Mrs. Frola or her son-in-law Mr. Ponza is crazy.  The plot is just so clever and well done.  In Italian society when a man marries the daughter of a widow it was commonplace for the widow to live with the couple.  Mr. Ponza instead maintains a seperate flat for his mother-in-law.  The story turns on why he does this.  Some say it is because the woman's daughter is dead and to shield her from learning this he keeps Mrs. Frola away, letting her occasionally visit and having his second wife pretend she is his dead wife.  Some say Mr. Ponza does not know his wife is dead and Mrs. Frola goes along with it so Mr. Ponza will not be heartbroken.  

Pirandello does a way better job than I just did of unwinding the story.  Just a delight.

"With Other Eyes" opens with a second wife finding in her husband's chest of drawers a miniature picture of his dead first wife.  At first she feels jealousy perhaps hatred for her.  Then she thinks about how she died.  Her husband found she had committed adultery and he coerced her into suicide.  She begins to see her husband through the eyes of his first wife.  This a very interesting psychologically perceptive story.

I liked both of these stories a lot and will hopefully read more Pirandello one day.

The Non-Existent Knight by Italo Calvino (1959, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, in Our Ancestors)

My Posts on Italo Calvino

I have been reading works by Italo Calvino (1923 to 1985) for sometime.  About five years ago I purchased Our Ancestors, a collection of three novellas by Calvino on sale for 200 PHP.  With the reading of The Non-Existent Knight, set in the time of Charlemagne, I have finished the book.   It is very much modernist magic realism with a heavy dose of meta-fiction and more than a dash of whimsy thrown in.  The central "character" is a non-existent knight inhabiting a suit of armor.  Calvino in a preface written for Our Ancestors says you can read The Non-Existent Knight as an existentialist, a Jungian, a Freudian, a neo-Kantian or a structuralist or other ways or you can just enjoy it.  

I did enjoy this book and am for now going to leave it at that.  Calvino is a very self aware writer, watching himself tell a story and this idea is played with in The Non-Existent Knight.

Two Short Stories by Primo Levi. -"The Tranquil Star" and "Bear Meat"

One of the greatest things about the reading life is there will always be great new writers to discover.  A few months ago you might have never heard of a writer and now you cannot imagine not having read their work. This is also one of the saddest aspects in that you probably will never become aware of many writers you would have loved, writers that would have changed your perspective, helped you fight off the darkness, delighted you with their brilliance and the beauty in their prose.  

Levi, I first was motivated to read him by a suggestion of Linda Lappin and thd appearance of two of his short stories in the archives of The New Yorker provided me with the opportunity to do so, is not just a great writer, he was a great person.

"A Tranquil Star" (published in translation for the first time Feb 12, 2009 in The New Yorker- I do not know the original date and place of publication.  If you do, please leave a comment) begins with narrator reflecting on the inadequacy of language to describe the immensity of stars.  The narrator very interestingly and I think rightly tells us that language of size makes sense when you say an elephant is large or a flea small but not when we apply these terms to entities observable by science like stars and atoms.  I think based in just the reading of two stories by Levi that one of his themes is that modern man needs to renew his spirit by opening  up to the natural world as free if the blinders of received culture as we can.  At about midpoint the narrative line splits and we learn are with an astronomer at an observatory in the Peruvian Andes, where the air is clearest.  He speaks of stars going nova, exploding, and taking with them planetary systems and civilizations unknown to humans.  

You can read, for a couple of months, this story here.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/12/a-tranquil-star

"Bear Meat" (Published in translation in The New Yorker - Jan. 8, 2007, I also need original publication data on this story, please) is about the experinces of three young mountain climbers who spent a night in a shed atop an arduously claimed peak.  In the darkness the narrator begins to see other people in the shed.  He thinks only a certain kind of person can make the climb.  The power of the story begins in conversations with two of the others in the shack.  Like "Tranquil Star" the story is partially about the renewing cleansing power of primal unfiltered by human artifacts encounters with nature.  This story is just wonderful, a true joy to read.

You can for a while read this story here

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/01/08/bear-meat

I greatly enjoyed both these stories.  I sense a great depth of thought in them.

There is an excellant reflection of the life and work of Levi here

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/06/17/a-hard-case

I hope very much to read his autobiographical Survival in  Austweitz.

Please share your experience with Primo Levi with us.  

"The French Teacher" by Geda Jacolutti (1986, translated by Martha King)

My Posts on Italian Women Writers

Women in Translation August 2014

A Few months ago I began a new Reading Life Project focusing on short fiction, in translation, by Italian women.  In the two collections pictured above I have access to works by about forty writers.  

As part of my participation in Women in Translation August 2014, a month long very well organized event hosted by Biblio Life in Letters focusing on works of fiction by female writers which have been translated into English.  (There are lots of great reading ideas and a very interesting schedule on the host web page.)

On first hearing of Women in Translation August 2014 I thought this fits quite well with my long term opened project on Italian women writerst.  Many of the writers focus on the chaos and displacement in post war Italian society.   Many are very influenced by existentialist writers like Sarte and Camus.  

"The French Teacher" by Geda Jacolutti  covers in a few pages the emotional and intellectual development of the narrator from a young girl of fourteen or so to a mature translator of the classics.  As the story opens the narrator tells us that all the girls in her school group have a crush on the French teacher.  "Vampish" men were the rage then and to the girls the French teacher is the epitome of sophistication and sex appeal.   It was fun to see the attempts of some of the more advanced girls try to flirt with the teacher.  As the years go by, she sees him occasionally.  She begins to develop a passion for the classics.  As the story closes, he seems a bent over old man.  We wonder who has really changed the most.  

I read this story in New Italian Women:  A Collection of Short Fiction edited by Martha King. 

This anthology is published by Italica Press, a leading publisher of literary and historical works related to Italy.  Anyone interested in Italian literature and history will find their webpage very valuable.  They have an extensive offering of translated works by Italian women. 

http://www.italicapress.com/

Geda Jacolutti (1921 to 1989, Udine, Italy) taught in a women's public school for thirty years.  She published a number of short stories as well as extensive poetry.  She was a classical scholar of high repute who translated numerous classics.

Mel u