Books & Reviews Archive

The setting is Japan across a chronological span that stretches from the years immediately preceding the Second World War up to the outbreak of the conflict. Against a backdrop of unease and mounting economic hardship, a family drama unfolds: the story of four sisters. An ancient family, now in decline, has split into a main branch—which moves to Tokyo and retains the authority over fundamental family decisions—and a secondary branch, residing in Osaka and centered around the protagonist, one of the sisters: Sachiko. This woman assumes responsibility for her two younger sisters: one unable to find a husband due to her shyness and aloofness, and the other, more modern and emancipated, who works as an artist and weaves a web of romantic affairs, including with men of a lower social standing than the family. The novel is an assemblage of small episodes, featuring a narrative arc that appears fragmented, yet builds precisely upon the portrayal of the intimacy of a Japanese household, and the clash between the tradition of customs and values on the one hand and Western modernity on the other. The women wear kimonos, but also Western dress; they attend the theater to watch ancient Japanese performances, yet devour Western books and films. Even the most rebellious girl, one of the younger sisters, who dreams of going to France to study dressmaking, attends a traditional dance school and gains renown by crafting traditional Japanese dolls. The strictures of tradition fail to confine or ossify familial affections. Sachiko’s repeated matchmaking efforts on behalf of one of the younger sisters fall through because she cannot bring herself to thwart her sister’s will and temperament. The scandals provoked by the other sister ultimately meet with Sachiko’s forgiveness and benevolence. The love among the sisters and within the family proves stronger than any rule or imposition. One might assume the context is defined by the war, and that conflict must eventually burst into the novel (much like a sort of *War and Peace*). This is not the case: the war remains perpetually in the background, scarcely mentioned, and what matters above all are the private tribulations, the protagonists' search for serenity and balance. Only the letters from Western friends who have left Japan evoke the approaching military conflict, of which, however, there is not yet full awareness. Perhaps the author wishes to reassure the reader (it should be remembered that it was serialized during the war), or perhaps he offers a subtle critique of familism, of that excessive fixation on individual feelings and personal friendships, which delays an awakening to the reality of unfolding events. It would have been compelling had there been a sequel to the novel, to observe the characters’ conduct during the final phase of the conflict, beneath the bombings. The true fabric of the novel is woven from the customs and values of Japanese society, captured across myriad moments yet epitomized by nature—such as the family’s excursions to view the cherry blossoms. The peace, order, and serenity emanating from the natural world stand in stark contrast both to the complexity of the emotions and events, and to the creeping emergence of the war. The novel unfolds slowly, marked by a pronounced scarcity of plot-driven action, as everything hinges on minute particulars. Ultimately, it feels long-winded, though never dull, and at times repetitive.

Igino Ugo Tarchetti lived between 1839 and 1869. He is, therefore, a Risorgimento writer who was sidelined because he advanced a fierce critique of war and a clear recognition of the value of desertion and conscientious objection. The novel, partly autobiographical, relates the trials of Vincenzo D.: > one of those minds that cannot choose between prosperity and conscience, and are ever wretched creatures . The narrative is structured into three parts. The first part concerns the protagonist's childhood and adolescence. Abandoned, he grows up in an orphanage, where he meets Margherita, the great love of his life. It is a bombastic and rhetorical section, dominated by a romantic and spiritualistic view of life and the world. It is an unmitigated exaltation of love and nature, taken as an idyllic realm. A typical dialogue runs as follows: Margherita asks: > Where are we going? To love each other. And what are those fireflies doing? They love each other. And all those stars? They love each other. God, how beautiful the night is! It is love that adorns it . By page 71, the temptation to abandon the book is strong. The second part recounts the military life of Vincenzo D. Just as the two lovers resolve to marry, Vincenzo is called to arms. In pages of great efficacy, the narrative chronicles the individual and social transformation of a person forced to endure military discipline. Anyone who has completed military service cannot fail to recognize themselves in the author's words: > the drills, the march, the measured and mechanical motion, the deafening cadence of the drum, the novelty of the uniform, the harshness of command, and the discipline daze his mind, divert it from serious and sustained reflection, create new needs, new ideas, new semblances. The good have become bad, the bad worse, the worse wicked . Vincenzo's military life takes a turn when he is summoned to fight in the Crimean War. The very casus belli invoked by the author is of such futility that it constitutes in itself a critique of the absurdity of armed conflict: a Russian prince refuses to pay a visit to the Turkish minister and strolls through the streets of Constantinople with "whip in hand." This section of the book features the description of the Battle of the Chernaya: it feels like watching a modern special-effects film and, at once, a battle from the *Iliad*. Mangled bodies, severed heads, blood, and devastation are depicted with such chromatic force that one visualizes them as if in a painting. The narrative reaches its peak impact when nature itself (here no longer benign, but man's adversary) takes part in the battle: > the sea casts back upon the shore the masts, the rigging, the corpses. A gigantic wave, which seems to reabsorb into itself all the other waves of the ocean, draws near slow and majestic to the shore. A long line of shipwrecked men appears atop it, thrashing their chests and arms: they feel the ground beneath their feet, but the wave pressing behind them surges forward, breaks over them, sweeps them away, and drags them back onto the high surface of the sea . Yet Vincenzo manages to survive, having not yet killed anyone, buried as he was beneath a heap of corpses. Upon regaining consciousness, he faces an enemy soldier and, much like in Fabrizio De André's *Canzone di Piero*, he is forced to kill him, only to rush to beg his forgiveness and realize that the slain soldier > was handsome, with a beauty at once virile and gentle; he had blond, ringleted hair, a broad and serene brow . On the verge of death, the soldier asks Vincenzo, "Why did you kill me?" At that point, the protagonist resolves to desert and claim his freedom: > I had thrown down the gauntlet to humanity; I had nothing with me but my conscience: how was I to sustain that struggle? The third part is the descent into madness, rooted in the homicide. By now, the narrative devolves into philosophy and a collection of aphorisms, in some instances nonsensical. A trenchant declaration against war and, above all, against military life clearly emerges, while a pantheistic worldview now prevails. The whole degenerates into a confused political manifesto. The author relies on a narrative framing device (Vincenzo D. recounts to the writer, who in turn recounts to a friend), which, rather than enlivening the reading, contributes to weighing it down, as the tale unfolds entirely in the first person in the form of a narration: a narration that often serves as an occasion for tedious philosophical digressions that drag down the narrative pace. The bombastic, emphatic style, heavily laden with adjectives, frequently makes for a turgid read. Why not read it? It is sufficient to visit a public library and confine oneself to the pages depicting military life and the great Battle of the Chernaya (forty pages in all).

The novel opens with the description of the setting in which the story will unfold. Sulaco, a natural harbor on the western coast of Costarica, is an > enormous semicircular and unroofed temple, open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains adorned with mourning draperies of clouds . In this natural amphitheater there is a > sanctuary inviolable by the temptations of world trade in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido : It is a peninsula, which > lies out on the sea like a rough head of stone, and extends from a green-clad coast at the end of a slender spit of sand overgrown with patches of thorny scrub . Waterless, arid, > the poor man, mingling with an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of the devil and of wealth, will tell you that it is lifeless because of its hidden treasures . It is in this coastal wasteland that legend has it three men vanished in search of gold. The opening of the novel encapsulates the narrative style and the meaning of this sprawling book. The moral and idealistic degradation of men swept away by an unstoppable fate—that of triumphant capitalism—is narrated by Conrad in a rich, lush, evocative prose, at times bombastic and redundant. The heart of the novel is Sulaco, perhaps the true protagonist: a small town cut off from Costarica by high mountains, an easy haven for ships and favored by nature with an inexhaustible silver mine, its fortune but also its damnation. In the background lies the quintessential South American country, burdened by the > lawlessness of a people of every color and race, by barbarism, by an irremediable tyranny . As Bolívar, the great liberator, used to say: > America is ungovernable. Whoever works for its independence has drained the sea . In this context there is no room for feelings, for delicate, fragile souls, fraught with uncertainty: everyone must be a "hero > , men of action and not of thought, driven by grand ideals or ignoble designs. Sulaco hosts numerous strong-willed characters: the Garibaldian who took refuge in the New World because he refused to bow after the betrayal of Aspromonte; the haughty young Costarican woman devoted to a dream of moral and political rebirth for her country; her fiancé, seemingly disillusioned, yet whose love for her leads him to the idea of separating Sulaco from the volatile Costarica to forge a solid, democratic, Western state. Among these, and many others, stands the figure of Nostromo: a man with the weight of countless generations behind him and with no ties to account for..... like the People > . Nostromo is strong, courageous, driven by the desire for renown: he is a quintessential man of the people, with an obscure sense of greatness, with his boundless devotion to something desperate, just as his passions are desperate (...) Splendid, robust, and agile, he threw back his head, spread his arms, and stretched out with a slow twist of the torso and a deep breath, calm and menacing, natural and free from evil at the moment of awakening, like a magnificent, unconscious wild beast. Then, with a suddenly rigid stare fixed upon nothingness from beneath a pensive expression, the man appeared > . An exaltation of the primordial authenticity of male physicality that could almost be Pasolini’s! What disrupts this world of pure heroes, possessing a virtue equal to that of untamed nature, is the arrival of an Englishman, Gould, determined to exploit the silver mine. Mind you, it is not a lust for money that drives him, but a vision—one might say today, a strategic one: silver is the symbol of a rebirth, of a new world. Yet, as his wife well understands (the only sensitive soul, filled with doubts and dismayed by the moral and social implications of what is unfolding), the mine has turned into a fetishism, and now the fetishism had grown into a monstrous destructive force > . To save the silver, threatened by yet another Costarican revolution, Nostromo is entrusted with the task of transporting a shipment by sea to a vessel waiting offshore in the ocean. A series of unfortunate circumstances shipwrecks the boat upon the very arid and mysterious peninsula described at the beginning of the novel. Here, Nostromo abandons his traveling companion to certain death—the very young idealist in love, who vanished without a trace, swallowed up in the immense indifference of things > : an obvious metaphor for how ideals are valued. In that same grim spot, he conceals the precious cargo. From that moment on, he becomes a rich man, but at the cost of a vile betrayal. On the other hand, old or young, everyone likes money, and they will speak well of the man who gives it to them > . The novel ends tragically. Nostromo is killed by mistake by a friend, who mistakes him for his daughter's suitor, when in fact the man was going to retrieve some silver from his hidden hoard. One might say on the surface that greed is stronger than grand ideals. In reality, the theme of the novel is something else, encapsulated in this sentence by Gould: Saleco is no longer a paradise of snakes. We have brought humanity and we cannot turn our backs to leave and start a new life > . Capitalism brings civilization, but all this comes at a cost: the loss of heroes > . In short, Conrad is a bard of imperialism, with the difference compared to other Western authors (such as Kipling) that in him lives the myth of the noble savage. The novel is very long, extremely uneven, and devoid of narrative rhythm. Alongside very fine pages, generally those dedicated to the description of the environment, there follow monotonous and repetitive dialogues, abrupt scene shifts—often temporal and disconcerting—while the historical and political descriptions disrupt the narrative without adding anything of interest. The characters are stereotypes, devoid of psychological and existential depth; the web of relationships is superficial, poorly developed. The writing is linguistically fascinating, with occasionally poetic flourishes, evocative of an imaginative world; on the other hand, all this is life, it must be life, even though it is so like a dream". The author allows himself, however, to be carried away by the sheer indulgence of writing, by the redundancy of words, by the pleasure of the baroque and the marvelous. Consequently, the narrative style also becomes ponderous and at times suffocating. Why not read it? It is long and prolix.

The book brings together 29 short stories, an anthology that includes famous writers such as Bassani, Buzzati, Gadda, Moravia, Pasolini, Pratolini, Cassola, and others; but also lesser-known authors, nonetheless representative of our country's literature. It is impossible to account for every story—many, in fact, not particularly successful—so I shall dwell only on a few. They share a common trait: they speak of the material living conditions of 1950s Italy, through an approach poised between truth and poetry, between social design and personal histories. Carlo Bernari is a forgotten writer today, yet in 1929 he penned a novel (*Tre operai*) that offered a realistic portrait of the working-class condition under Fascism, and which for this reason circulated semi-clandestinely. In his long story, *Il crumiro*, Bernari tells us of Peppino, a resourceful Neapolitan: in post-war Bari, he manages to find work as a factory handyman, build himself a house—unauthorized, naturally—hook into the electricity and water supplies, on the sly as always, and raise a family. > The Neapolitan way, his workmates would tease him, when in the morning they discovered the mended tap, the new steam intake, a stool fashioned from an old packing crate (...). Not exactly by the book, but haphazardly—yes, the Neapolitan way—yet it was done all the same . And if it is true that everything (the house, the job, and the numerous brood) comes with its drawbacks ( > but really, inside they hear us, outside they see us, will you tell me what kind of love this is? ) Peppino feels he has achieved many milestones, modest to today's eyes, yet significant in the Italy of that era. When, following a rain that had been pouring down for days, > the drains blocked, a muddy, greenish water surged back up from underground (...) reaching the furthest courtyard, where Peppino lived: and there it stagnated and destroyed the house of Peppino and his family, annihilating his dreams. Alongside Rea, Prisco, Ortese, and others, Raffaele La Capria belongs to that Neapolitan narrative vein tracing back to Matilde Serao. In this short story (*Ninì prende il largo*), La Capria speaks of freedom, and does so through the Posillipo sea. Ninì is a «scugnizzo». His bony, sun-blackened back, flecked with salt, one with the rock, was already beginning to scorch under the sun (...) But Ninì's attention was fixed on the transparent little hollow, among those four stones on the bottom, which if you picked them up and brought them to the surface were stones like any other, (...) yet when you saw them under half a meter of water so clear, they were full of adventures«. He is fishing for rock goby (a rockfish that »even the cat turns its nose up at > ), when a friend shouts for him to get into the boat. And there he is, rowing towards the tip of Posillipo, calling out to the girls to come to the balconies, playing the swaggerer to those on the rocks: and he wiggled his little backside on the prow of the boat, drumming with his heels against the sides, as if to spur it on. (...) Now, as the boat pressed forward, the horizon line shifted further and further away, behind the Cape of Posillipo, and the promontory receded further into the coast, and before Ninì's eyes the perfect circle of the gulf opened up, revealing glimpses of other distances. (...) Thinking back on it now, the transparent hollow beneath the rocks of Palazzo Donn'Anna seemed to Ninì no larger than a washtub > . Bonaventura Tecchi won the Premio Bancarella in 1960 with the novel *Gli egoisti*«. In *La ragazza della filanda*, the protagonist is a mill worker »big and bony, almost like a man > , (...) retaining beneath that masculine frame a curious innocence, partly timid and partly simple-minded . She has not yet known sex, and laughs when her workmates tell her that love > is a taste, pretty much like the one you get from eating delicious treats . > It seemed that her very body, so square and strong, was a suit of armor, inside which love could never have entered through malice, perhaps only through violence . And so it happens: a man, simply because he «had her close at hand», courts her, convinces her to let him take her home, and when he realizes that > she truly had never been touched by love, he felt almost a sense of resentment, (...) and when the swift, violent pleasure arrived, and the immense satisfaction, his male pride, even then there remained (...) the desire to humiliate her . And she, dumped after a few days, walks > away alone down the lane, those bony shoulders shuddering under the little shawl, yet without crying. Giovanni Testori is known as a playwright, but he wrote numerous short stories and novels. The short story *Guardati intorno ed impara* is enigmatic, so much so that its overall meaning remains unclear until the very end. A young woman flees from a house, stumbles, leans against a wall, attempts to reconnect with life: she realizes > that she has nothing left to do but hide herself, not only from people but from things as well . This is the opening of a story: as it slowly unfolds, we understand that the young woman has killed a man, not because she truly wanted to, but because of a familial mechanism. Sister, brother, and mother are bound to one another by a knot that > in its elemental nature was almost tragic: bonds withheld from any sentimental expression, yet manifesting in all their force whenever the family's life passed through some difficult situation. Then a word, a question, or a mere reference was enough for the three to find themselves constrained and almost damned to a single destiny. (...) It would have been necessary to destroy, by dint of being all-powerful, every human remnant. The stories of Peppino, Ninì, the mill worker, and the young woman are paradigmatic of a society and an existential condition. Hustling, often in vain; yearning for freedom, even for a fleeting moment; settling for any kind of love; letting oneself be ensnared by familial mechanisms—these are the defining traits of an Italy on the verge of change, yet where resignation still prevails. Despite the prevailing pessimism, the four stories exhibit narrative power and innovation: the authors construct elegant and compelling plots, significant and substantial characters; they have something to say, and they do so in a prose that is cultured, yet already contemporary. Spoken language is making its way into the written word and will later do so with overwhelming force; for now, it serves to prevent the stories from cutting "the tedious and wretched figure of the antiquated (Antonio Baldini in the introduction). Why not read it? They are four fine stories, but they are not worth the chore of reading more than five hundred pages..