Books & Reviews Archive

Kafka’s stories are generally brief writings, characterized by a paradoxical plot and cryptic, scarcely accessible content. Undoubtedly his most important story is *The Metamorphosis*, which can be regarded as a masterpiece both from a strictly literary perspective and in terms of its thematic substance. Gregor, a model employee, awakens transformed into a large insect, likely a cockroach. At first, the family is stunned; then they feel a stir of pity and compassion toward him (particularly the sister), and finally indifference and contempt set in. Ultimately, Gregor lets himself die, and his parents and sister do not even care where his body has been discarded. The story lends itself to multiple interpretations. First of all, what is the cause of this transformation? Is it, perhaps, the revolt of a young man compelled, at an early age, to support his family (the debt-ridden, idle father; the sister who aspires to be a violinist) under the rigid, oppressive control of an office manager? Following the night of the transformation, in the morning Gregor ought to depart early as usual, and the fact that he remains in his room is regarded by all as a display of indolence—itself already a defiance of social rules. > "Chief Clerk," Gregor cried out, "be patient for just a moment! Yet I am already feeling much better. How can such a thing happen!" . It is the theme of a bureaucratic, oppressive society that in no way tolerates the breach of rules. Yet there is, for me, another theme that is even more universal. What happens when a person falls prey to a serious illness? At first, everyone stands by him, full of compassion and kindness; then, little by little, people begin to alienate the patient, altering his habits and his furniture because he is no longer needed, until abandoning him to indifference. This is what happens to Gregor. At first, his sister cares for him, unlike his father, who from the very beginning rejects him to the point of grievously wounding him. Then the mother and sister decide to clear the room of furniture so as to make it easier for Gregor to crawl along the walls (a clear demonstration of a kindness that disregards the patient’s wishes). Gregor does not want this, because it signifies relinquishing his nature as a man, as a healthy person, and he reacts to the point of clinging to a picture to prevent them from taking it away. Then one day, as his sister plays the violin, Gregor, the large insect, is entranced by the sound and longs to draw near to his sister, to embrace her and have her play for him alone. Instead, he is cruelly repelled because he is a monster. Nothing remains but solitude and death. Alongside Gregor’s transformation, a change takes place within his relatives. The father goes back to work and struts around in his uniform, the sister works as a shop assistant and wears open collars, and the mother works as well. When Gregor is gone, a new life begins, wholly forgetful of the kinsman who had nonetheless helped them so much.

We are in Wexford, a county located in the north-eastern part of Ireland and depicted by Billy Roche across numerous theatrical works. The setting common to all the stories is the Rainwater pond: > a dark and treacherous place. You could drop a coin in and watch it enter the murky water, go home, have your tea, go to the cinema, return home a second time, (...) and that coin was still sinking as you walked back in for dinner . The dark allure of the pond led the protagonist of one of the most evocative stories, *One Is Not a Number*, a poor cripple marginalized and tormented by the other boys, to believe that “the place had magical properties that could somehow cure him,” if only he dipped his poor foot in the water. And lingering further on this splendid tale, magical indeed this pond must be if at a certain point a doppelgänger appears—the boy the wretched cripple wished he could have been: > he was the other me, the real me, the one who lived inside me, (...) handsome, strong, and healthy, with wheat-coloured hair and not a single freckle, (...) an elegant bearing, I thought, and he possessed a deep voice he never overused . And Evelyn, the girl loved in vain by the cripple, “walked home, floating an inch or two off the ground,” looking like a fairy. Has the ugly toad transformed into a graceful white swan? As in all the stories, the individual lives fade away, at times without a definitive conclusion, into the banality of existence—as though we were all trapped in our fate, in a prosaic, narrow, and stagnant everyday life; and Rainwater Pond is simultaneously a physical place and a metaphor for our suffering consciousness, powerless to break free. As the protagonist reflects in the final story, tellingly titled *A Quiet Place*, all that fretful striving to have a life of one’s own had merely been > a mysterious twist of fate that had ultimately worked for his own good; and at that moment it was all over, the actors had packed their costumes back into their suitcases and returned to everyday life . Across the sequence of stories, a rupture emerges, dividing the collection into two parts. Up to the tale of the cripple and his desperate loneliness—a long, intricate story—an ancestral magic realism holds sway, recalling Elsa Morante’s *Menzogna e Sortilegio* and Anna Maria Ortese’s *Il mare non bagna Napoli* and *Il Cardillo addolorato* (see the reviews on this site); at times, a yearning for love emerges that is meant to compensate for physical flaws (as with fat Maggie) or to help escape an unhappy condition: consider the splendid ending of *The Northern Lights*, where the protagonist returns home to find her husband disappointed to see her, without a trace of suspicion or jealousy: > she sighed to herself. Everything was clearer to her now. That night, after tea, she would go upstairs to paint a portrait of him: a solitary man seated at the window, before a silvery night sky . Incidentally, this is a very different reaction from that of Alba de Céspedes’ protagonist in *Da parte di lei*, who kills her husband because he is indifferent and bored (see the review on this site). In the second part, the narrative pace becomes brisk; the characters seem to be on a stage performing a play; the reading flows swiftly, intriguing and effortless, but the fantastical atmosphere of the earlier stories slowly disperses, and even the pond dissolves into the background, losing the uncanny and mysterious presence that lent the narrative its charm. We are far removed here from other Irish writers, with their captivating, evocative, at times impenetrable vocabulary, characterized by an intricate, often challenging syntax: neologisms, cadences that seem to stem from languages other than standard English, long sentences, digressions, and parenthetical clauses. Here, the sentences are short, with extensive punctuation, as is often the case in contemporary American fiction. The translation succeeds in conveying the deeper meaning of the stories, though one wonders whether it might have simplified the diction, as so frequently happens. Perhaps the prose and narrative structure reflect the author’s predominantly theatrical background. Why read it? A meditation on the human condition, viewed through a microcosm.

It is chilling to read this novel in light of a recent news story, in which a boy stabbed his French teacher, unleashing upon her a hatred and violence one would never wish to see harbored in an adolescent. We are in the 1960s, in an “old and poor Milan,” yet already convulsed by traffic that was “unpleasant, irritating; drivers glared at one another with hatred, the traffic lights were always red, (...) and outside nothing could be seen, only the fog.” In this city so different from today's, a heinous crime has been committed: eleven boys have raped, beaten, tortured, and ultimately murdered a frail night-school teacher. True, they are already petty criminals: some the children of “honest parents,” others with fathers in prison and mothers working as prostitutes, but all of them known to the police for acts of violence, petty theft, and alcohol abuse. For the chief inspector, it is a straightforward case: they are all guilty, and the essential thing is to get rid of this “rabble” as quickly as possible, handing the matter over to the investigating magistrate, the reformatory, and prison. Not so for Duca Lamberti, the protagonist of Scerbanenco’s detective novels (see the review of *Venere Privata* on this site): an unusual policeman for whom “truth was the only thing that mattered (...), even if, in the end, it was of no use.” It arouses his suspicion that they all say the exact same thing: “namely, that they hadn't done anything, that they had been forced to stand in a corner while the others did everything.” It is too clever a defense, and maintained by all of them, as though prearranged. “This line of defense was concocted before the crime, and by someone smarter and not drunk like those boys,” Duca Lamberti concludes. From here unfolds a police investigation made not of deft, subtle reconstructions designed to trap the suspects and force them into confession; nor does the inquiry dissolve into sociological analyses or excuses to narrate the protagonist's life. Everything remains in the background. Only occasionally are there brief brushstrokes of a Milan that longed to remain that of the late nineteenth century, with its taverns, still *trani* and not yet bars, where the drunkards “still fell asleep, as in the days of Porta, their heads resting on their arms, and there were the aging prostitutes, (...) and there was the tired, kind flower seller, limping gently. (...) The row of parked cars stretching the entire length of the street took nothing away from this innocence: they were the intruders.” And feelings appear fleetingly, timid, conveyed through small gestures: “‘Sleep,’ she said, ‘and keep me warm.’ They would make love another time, she knew. He warmed her, but did not sleep; he tickled her neck with his stubbly, unshaven cheek, and his breath was a warm whisper on her breast that kept her from sleeping.” Duca Lamberti’s approach stems from the empathy he feels for these boys, or at least for some of them. He attempts to forge a relationship of care with them, encouraging them to open up not out of fear of the police, but so that they might understand the evil they have committed—an evil devastating first and foremost to themselves. Not that he fully succeeds: the first boy, frail and young, a homosexual, kills himself, destroyed by guilt; the other, fourteen-year-old Carolino Marassi, an orphan and petty thief, comes close to being killed. Duca Lamberti makes mistakes; he is often depressed when confronted with such cruelty, and dispirited when Carolino runs away, betraying the trust placed in him. “‘He’s a good boy,’ Duca said, ‘but you’ve never been in a reformatory or in prison or an orphanage, and you cannot understand what freedom means to a boy like that.’” Confined to a literary genre, Noir, traditionally regarded as second-rate, Scerbanenco is rarely counted among the great Italian writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Perhaps his dry, concise, unadorned style, often mistaken for literary poverty, contributed to this as well. Far from it: Scerbanenco’s style is the result of a deliberate pursuit of essentiality, mirrored in a plot admirably stripped of redundancy, as well as in his prose and vocabulary. There is no need for distractions or idle digressions: the story and the “boys of the massacre” speak for themselves. They reveal more about our society, and about abandonment, than any number of sociological analyses or moralistic reflections. The writer’s sole task is to recount their despair, shouldering its weight. Why read it? A splendid noir, an intense social novel.

The book is structured in two parts. The first part recounts the adventure of Yanes, who sets out to rescue Tremal-Naik and his daughter Darma. The setting is Borneo, rich in strange fauna and an exotic atmosphere. Plot twists follow one after another, yet a certain artificiality and repetitiveness emerge, rendering the reading tedious. This section of the book closes with yet another surprise: the terrible leader of the Thugs had a son, who now seeks to avenge his father’s death and has allied himself with the British to defeat Sandokan. The island of Mompracem has been conquered, and the pirates of Malaysia decide to declare war on England. In the second part, the true protagonist emerges: the cruiser *Re del Mare*, aboard which the Tigers roam, fight, and conquer. Seascapes return—a tempestuous sea and rugged, inaccessible coastlines. And an impossible love story unfolds, between Darma and the son of the terrible Thug. The narrative becomes more intricate, as combat episodes alternate with conversational interludes, gradually forging a kind of friendship between the son of the Terrible Thug and the pirate chieftains. As in *The Black Corsair*, one would expect an unhappy ending; indeed, here matters reach the point where Sandokan and Yanes could well be defeated, killed, or taken prisoner. Sandokan, in particular, is weary; he is no longer the man he once was, far less marmoreal than he appeared in the other novels. Yet in the end comes the plot twist: love triumphs, and out of love, the son of the terrible Thug realizes that vengeance is pointless, not least because by pursuing it he would lose his beloved. The pirate chieftains are freed. Unlike the other books in the Malaysian cycle, here one faces a flagging narrative momentum (so much so that the author leans heavily on his well-worn techniques without any innovation), and even the depiction of the setting (the sea and the jungle) seems marginal to the tale. What does emerge, however, is a theme absent from the other novels: technology, embodied in the cruiser's sheer power and the introduction of an inventor capable of triggering remote explosions. Technology renders Sandokan and Yanes obsolete: their life cycle has ended because the world has changed; it is no coincidence that they are defeated by four cruisers, likewise powerful and swift. Yet technology has its frailties: the *Re del Mare* sails under the constant dread of finding no coal to feed its boilers, and the inventor perishes, struck down by a mere shell. The age of sail fades away, but the new technologies grant the "heroes" far less autonomy and independence.

The novel is the continuation of *The Black Corsair*. The pirate is still in pursuit of the hated Duke Wan Gould, and the book unfolds across a series of combats and adventures, interspersed with long, captivating descriptions of the Caribbean forest. The Duke perishes with his ship, and in the end the pirate is reunited with his beloved Honorata, who has become queen of the cannibals. The book displays a highly complex structure and develops across several planes, with the introduction of new characters. At the center of the novel lies the fatalism of the Black Corsair, now convinced that he is condemned to unhappiness and destined to bring grief to others as well. In a conversation with Yara, the young Indian woman who will be killed by the Spaniards, the pirate confesses his conviction of being predestined to bring misfortune to women: > One cannot love the Black Corsair, maiden. I bring misfortune to the women who draw near me. You have seen it! and again, after Yara's death, > I am fatal to all – he said in a somber voice – take care of this maiden, Marchioness . On the other hand, the thirst for vengeance overwhelms the Black Corsair, constituting a destiny from which he cannot escape, even should he wish to. In his conversation with the Marchioness of Bermejo (a splendid new character of Salgari’s), when asked what he would do with the Duke if Honorata were alive, the Black Corsair replies > do you believe, Madame, that the souls of my brothers have been appeased? When the sea turns phosphorescent, the Red Corsair and the Green, the Duke's victims, resurface: they demand vengeance. When the hurricane sweeps in from the East, amidst the howling of the wind, I hear a voice that comes from the shores of Flanders: it is that of my elder brother, treacherously murdered by the Duke, and that voice demands vengeance as well . Even at the moment he meets Honorata, whom he is finally free to love since the Duke is dead, the Black Corsair yearns for death ("Yes, death, oblivion!") and his dark despair is such that he seems to see the dead calling to him ( > Look at them, Honorata, look at them... There is the Green Corsair... there is the Red... there is your father... and my other brother, too, slain on the lands of Flanders... ) and the pirate wishes to join them ("I am coming!... Brothers!... I am coming!"). Only love saves him, and to the Black Corsair's question of whether to choose between life and death, Honorata whispers, "Your love." Alongside this struggle between hatred and love move the secondary characters surrounding the Black Corsair, who are in fact central to the novel: in particular, his companions, Carmaux, Wan Stiller, and Moko, who tend to the Black Corsair with fraternal devotion and lend the novel a sense of brio by tempering its dramatic intensity: an extraordinarily modern device, essential in giving the book rhythm and reading pleasure. Nature, too, emerges as a major protagonist: a lush nature, teeming with fantastic fauna, especially birds and reptiles, which Salgari describes with meticulous precision and a desire to seek distraction and forget the despair that dominates the figure of the Black Corsair. To claim that this is merely an appetite for exoticism is to overlook the contrast between the surrounding setting and the pirate’s emotions: the description of the environment carries the tone of escape and repose. The final theme of the novel consists of combat, particularly naval battles and shipwrecks; the sea is yet another protagonist, and splendid are the pages depicting the clash between the *Folgore* (the beloved *Folgore*!) and the Duke’s ships. The book is flawless, both in terms of its rhythm and with respect to its characters and plot.

The first-person narrator is a young girl, then an adolescent, and finally a young woman, who recounts how she became the “cantora” of the history of her people (Ethiopia) and of the Italians, when the latter conquered her country. The book opens with the great-grandfather’s account of the birth of the girl’s grandmother during the resistance against the Italians and the violent death of her parents, an Italian man and an Ethiopian woman. The book thus takes as its starting point an act of great love that binds the two peoples together, yet the cruelty of the racial laws, which forbade an Italian from marrying an Ethiopian woman, surfaces from the very beginning. The old man makes the girl promise that she will tell these stories, so that a memory may endure for the future. The girl grows into an adolescent, forgets her promise, and decides to go study in Italy, in Bologna. Now twenty-three, she returns to Ethiopia upon hearing news of the old man’s death, but arrives too late to take part in the collective mourning that traditionally accompanies a funeral. She is thus left suspended in an unspoken, internal grief, and with a sense of estrangement from the others, who now perceive her as an outsider. The great-great-grandfather had left as a dying wish that the girl go pray at an important sanctuary. The central section of the book unfolds, then, over six days during which the young woman travels to the monastery, meets an elderly hermit, and above all, as she waits, listens to the stories of women—tales concerning the tragic and complex encounter between Ethiopia and Italy. Gradually, she manages to process her grief and realize that her destiny is to fulfill what her elders had asked of her: “you shall be our cantora.” One of the central themes of the book is undeniably Italian colonialism, its cruelties and aberrations: particularly tragic are the pages recounting the massacre perpetrated by the Italians in the wake of the assassination attempt on Graziani. It would be reductive, however, to limit the book to this theme alone. In reality, the narrative structure of the work is remarkably complex, revealing at least three distinctive features: its choral nature, derived from the collection of stories that form the heart of the book. The narrator says little about herself (even though she is the first-person narrator), for what matters is neither emotional introspection nor existential anguish; rather, the book aspires to be a progressive point of accumulation for the history of two peoples; the richness of its themes, which span from the processing of grief to the loss of roots experienced by those caught between two cultures, to the opposition of communal values against the loneliness of modern man. In this sense, the true setting of the story is Italy, interpreted through the vantage point of someone who comes from another culture: what emerges is a country defined by autumn colors, greyness, soliloquy and abandonment, and regret for the past; the narrative style, lean despite its rich vocabulary, which stands out favorably against the verbosity of many Italian writers.