Books & Reviews Archive

These are two short stories which, as is customary for Fante, are set within the milieu of the typical Italian family. In the first story, a telegram arrives announcing the death of a cousin, a boy who had been a childhood playmate of Mike, one of the family’s many brothers. A deeply humorous scene unfolds: while the mother weeps for the grief of her sister, who has lost a son, the boys fight over the telegram to the point of tearing it to pieces, thereby opening a dispute over how the cousin died and when the funeral will be held. The scene shifts to the funeral, attended by the mother, Mike, and his younger brother, the narrator. What strikes the boys is that the uncle does not weep for the death of his son, whereas all the relatives, particularly the women, unleash a flurry of wailing and shrieks. Mike, in particular, is afraid to approach his uncle, fearing that his resemblance to the dead cousin might make him the target of resentment. Yet it is precisely the sight of Mike—of what his own son might have been—that breaches the solitude of grief and moves the uncle to tears: > they sat there. Mike greedily sipped a milkshake, and Uncle Frank sat opposite him, his face in his hands, large tears sliding down his cheeks and dropping onto the table as he watched Mike and his milkshake . In the second story, Jimmy returns to his parents' home, which he had left after a stormy quarrel with his father. Once again, the portrait of a classic Italian family emerges: the mother has prepared a fine dinner with the sweets Jimmy loves, hoping that all will go well, without fights or arguments; the father pretends to have forgotten, unemployed, heading off to the tavern after dinner as he does every evening; the siblings greet their older brother enthusiastically, yet inevitably settle back into the everyday routine from which Jimmy now feels alienated. The conclusion cannot be otherwise: > I’ll get up and throw away the cigarette, and I’ll want to be with her (his girlfriend), not here, in this goddamned insignificant town forgotten by God . The stories, particularly the first, are very fine. The style is quintessentially Fante’s: elegant, tender, and effortlessly fluid.

The novel is set in Cuba in the period immediately preceding the revolution. The protagonist, a vacuum cleaner salesman (business is bad) and a widower with a fourteen-year-old daughter, is recruited by British intelligence as an agent in Havana. Enticed by the money, the protagonist fabricates a fictitious network of spies and invents a stream of reports, which are, of course, utterly false. Given the importance his operation assumes, London dispatches two agents to support him, among whom is Beatrice, with whom the protagonist falls in love. The narrative unfolds around this paradoxical premise, satirizing the machinery of espionage. Even when unmasked, the protagonist will be offered a position within the organization, as admitting a mistake is out of the question and, in any case, some grain of truth might still reside in the intelligence provided, blatantly fabricated though it is. Graham Greene himself placed this novel in the category of "entertainments," and this classification has undoubtedly influenced critics and readers in their interpretation of the book: a mockery of the world of espionage and an indictment, albeit framed as satire, of its tendency to distort reality (a remarkably timely subject). In truth, if one reads the novel outside this interpretive framework, other thematic layers emerge: the imaginary world forged by the protagonist (a web of spies and false reports) sets in motion a sequence of events, some of them tragic, that destroys the peace and the bonds of friendship that had defined his life. Furthermore, the latter acts by prioritizing familial devotion (providing his daughter with a prosperous future) over the demands of politics and the values of allegiance to one's country. What emerges is the contradiction between "genuine" values, formed by friendship and family ties, as opposed to "false" ones > , represented by a sense of belonging to abstract entities, such as the nation and ideologies. In the epilogue Beatrice, in truth the only genuinely positive character in the novel, explains to her superiors that even had she known, she would not have stopped the protagonist, because he was working for something important, not for someone's conviction about a global war that might never happen... and what does one's country mean anyway: a flag that someone invented two hundred years ago." The most significant limitation, which renders the label of "entertainment" appropriate, lies precisely in the figure of the protagonist, who seems not to realize what he has created, passively enduring events and leaving it to others to create and resolve problems. This is a passive attitude, which at times renders the novel monotonous and predictable. The style is highly effective, closely tied to dialogue, with a sentence structure displaying clear cinematic hallmarks: the English is classic.