There is no word, in any human language, capable of consoling the guinea pigs who do not know the reason for their death

(a Hiroshima survivor). Elsa Morante places this quotation as an epigraph to the novel, indicating that her aim is to recount the victims during a dramatic and painful period of our recent history: the years between 1941 and 1947. It would nonetheless be mistaken to think oneself before a modern version of Riccardo Bacchelli's novel (Il Mulino del Po, reviewed on this site), with which the great Bolognese writer intended to narrate post-unification history from the perspective of the humble. And how could that be, when the author is the very same behind Menzogna e Sortilegio (see review on this site)? How could we imagine ourselves before a historical, combative, trenchant, ideological novel, when Elsa Morante's narrative universe is oneiric and introspective? Ida, widow Mancuso, lives in Rome: a schoolteacher by profession, thirty-seven years of age, with a restless, engaging son named Nino; she has an

undernourished body, and formless in its structure, with a withered chest and an awkwardly swollen lower half, the face of a worn, delicate little girl. (...) In her large, dark, almond-shaped eyes there was a passive sweetness, of a deep and incurable barbarism, resembling a precognition. (...) The strangeness of those eyes recalled the mysterious idiocy of animals, who know the past and future of their destiny not with the mind, but through a sense of their vulnerable bodies. We shall call that sense (...) the sense of the sacred (...) the universal power that can devour and annihilate them, for the guilt of having been born

. While returning home, she is raped by a German soldier, who impregnates her; Giuseppe, known as Useppe, is born. Nino is always out roaming; alone with little Useppe, Ida endures the bombings and the destruction of her house, the evacuation to Pietralata into a vast communal room devoid of intimacy, the harsh German occupation, the deportation of the Jews, and, indirectly through Nino, the partisan resistance; then she somehow retreats into a small rented room, still alone with Useppe, sharing quarters with a family waiting in vain for their son missing in Russia. Finally, she achieves a respectable security that seems to set her on course for a peaceful life. All these tragic events pass through the lives of Ida and Useppe like a fairy tale, wherein the child resembles a cheerful yet wise gnome:

one would have said, indeed, from his laughter, from the constant brightening of his little face, that he did not see things confined within their usual appearances; but as multiple images of other things, infinitely varying

. It is as if the song of two woodland birds, whose words were crystal clear to Useppe's ears, expressed in their repetitive refrain the indecipherable meaning of what was taking place: "it's a joke, a joke, all a joke!". Were it not for the fact that Anna Maria Ortese's novel Il Cardillo addolorato dates from 1993, and Elsa Morante could thus not have drawn inspiration from the mysterious little song (

and fly, fly, fly, cardillo...., see the review on this site), there nonetheless emerges the same subterranean world, the magma seething beneath ordering rationality. Ida, Nino, and Useppe seem to survive just like their two dogs, Blitz and Bella, unwitting victims; dreams, on the contrary, reveal from the very beginning the anxieties stemming from the unconscious, submerged in fear and pain, to which one can neither assign meaning nor simply bear witness to such cruelty. Ida

walks with her father, who shelters her beneath his coat; when suddenly the coat flies away as if on its own, without her father. And she finds herself a little girl alone along certain mountain paths, trickles of blood escaping her vagina. (...) Instead of running away, she has stopped on the path to play with a young goat.... But she does not notice that the goat is crying out, in labor, about to give birth! And meanwhile, right there, already waiting, is a quartermaster from the electric slaughterhouses....(...) In the dream, Useppe was not on the shore, but in the water of the river-lake. And this water, though enclosed in a circle by the hills, appeared infinitely vast. (...) Useppe swam in this water naturally, like a little fish; and around him throughout the warm lake emerged countless little heads of other swimmers, companions of his. (...) But the most extraordinary thing about this joyful lake was that the circle of hills, battered by the bleak tempest, was mirrored within it, instead, intact and blissful, in the serene fullness of an early summer

. How to attain peace, how to break free from pain? Nothing remains but death or madness.

The reader departs from the book with a deeply evocative image. Useppe has fallen ill, suffered an epileptic seizure, Bella rushes toward home to summon Ida, and she awakens from a dream (

and then the kid and she, joyful, board the ship together"), is seized by an "incoherent panic" and rushes to save her son. "The three of them walked, huddled close together: Useppe perched on Bella as on a hobbyhorse, his head resting against Ida's side, who encircled him with her arm to support him

. What muted, melancholy tenderness! Clustered together, in the only solidarity they know, the three hope to save themselves! Elsa Morante stated in a 1959 interview,

the novelist (...) presents, in his work, a complete system of the world and of human relations of his own. Only, instead of expounding his system in terms of reasoning, he is driven, by his nature, to configure it in a poetic fiction, by means of narrative symbols" (quoted by Cesare Garboli in the introduction). With the aim of speaking of the victims, the writer seeks to abide by this canon; she gives her novel a nineteenth-century imprint, with a meticulous description of stories, places, and details, in an effort to legitimize the imaginary and grant it coherence. She slips into a lengthy, redundant scene in the manner of Dostoevsky, almost a replica of the Grand Inquisitor chapter from The Brothers Karamazov (see review on this site). However, the oneiric world is irrepressible; the unconscious bursts forth and dismantles the novel's overarching order: what emerges is a zibaldone, a miscellany where History merges with individual stories in an exaggerated and prolix mixture; Useppe lends a chivalric momentum to the narrative that might have redeemed us, but it is not enough.

Why read it? Certainly a great novel, but surely not on par with Menzogna e Sortilegio.