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The year 1893, in which much of the novel unfolds, was fraught with grave events for Italy, and for Sicily in particular. The government was embroiled in the Banca Romana scandal. In Sicily, the revolutionary outburst of the Fasci Siciliani movement, which had rallied a large part of the subproletariat (peasants and sulfur miners), was bloodily repressed by an army corps dispatched from the mainland. The dread of social revolution forged an alliance between the Bourbon loyalists and the patriotic factions of the island’s ruling class, as well as between the latter and the northern bourgeoisie. It was a decisive year for the history of the Mezzogiorno, sounding the death knell for the lingering hopes of a southern renaissance fostered by the Unification of Italy. Against this backdrop, Pirandello, still under the sway of *verismo*, penned an ostensibly historical novel, yet one deeply woven with memories of his native soil and family, steeped in a bitter sense of dejection that only estrangement from the affairs of life can render bearable. The novel is divided into two parts. The first, undeniably the more accomplished, is set in Agrigento, which, > in the wretched remnants of its ancient life gathered up there, rose silent and astonished, a survivor in the void of eventless time, in the neglect of a shelterless squalor . The gulf between past grandeur and present decay is conveyed not merely by the landscape, but also by the clash between the old and the young. The former are emblematically embodied by Prince Ippolito (an unyielding Bourbon loyalist) and Mauro Mortara, an aging Garibaldian soldier who subsists on the glorious memory of Risorgimento exploits. While the old remain entrenched in the roles thrust upon them by history, moving with steadfast conviction, the young are instead adrift, weighed down by a present life ever further removed from Risorgimento ideals, at a loss as to which values might offer them roots. Between the old and the young stir the opportunists—those who, out of self-interest or sheer indolence, capitalize on the moral decay of Italian society. There exists, furthermore, another faction, which has grasped “the vanity of time” and retreated into isolation on the fringes of madness. As the reading progresses, one becomes keenly aware of the narrative’s contemporary resonance. Are we reading of nineteenth-century Sicily, or of contemporary Italy? Is the rift between the old and the young the eternal generational conflict, or rather the consequence of a dispiriting, desolating inheritance bequeathed by past generations to their successors? > What could youth do, if the grasping, fearful, overbearing jealousy of the old crushed it so, with the weight of the basest prudence and of so many humiliations and disgraces? If to youth fell the furious, silent expiation of all the errors and unworthy compromises, the mortification of every pride, and the spectacle of so much ugliness? Yet so long as the social order remains immutable, each can comfortably enact the role assigned to them or assumed by choice: the revolutionaries can shout slogans against the powerful, the latter can hatch illicit schemes and villainies, the old can cling to their values, while the young let themselves be swept along and, ultimately, ruled by the opportunists. It is a comedy whose tragic nature stems not from the characters’ awareness, but from the desolation of the landscape and the blinding poverty of the common people. What a stark contrast between Pirandello’s prose, which betrays an intimate communion with his land, and that of Camilleri, where Sicily is reduced to mere folklore and facile irony! This, too, bears witness to our country's decline. Social revolution and political upheavals forcefully intrude upon the play of fictions. The second part of the novel, largely set in Rome, charts the disintegration of roles and the necessity for each individual to confront the truth. All the characters find themselves in the predicament of Corrado Selmi, a Risorgimento hero turned hollow, corrupt deputy: > the candid, light smile that had accompanied every act of his life had turned into that grim, hard, bitter grimace. Once again, he felt afraid of himself: afraid of gaining a precise awareness of a certain dark, hideous thing that had suddenly lodged itself deep within his being, throwing him into disarray, leaving him with the impression of being torn apart inside, irreparably . And each reacts according to their own strength, stripped of all pretense: Corrado Selmi takes his own life. In a desperate bid to dissociate himself from the deceits of the powerful Flaminio Salvo, the decent yet submissive Aurelio Costa is slaughtered by the sulfur miners alongside Nicoletta Capolino, who had hitherto been a social climber, eager to trade her feminine charms for success. Dianella, the sole daughter of the wealthy Flaminio Salvo, descends into madness at the sight of her father’s depravities. Lando, Prince Ippolito’s son, concedes in the face of the violent uprisings that his socialist ideals were nothing more than intellectual yearnings. Even Flaminio Salvo confesses that his greed has culminated in nothingness, in vanity. Who, then, holds the truth? Perhaps Don Cosmo, Lando’s uncle, was right when he remarked: > It will pass, the corners of his mouth drawn down, his brow rippled as if by waves of thoughts pushed back by the ebb of his disconsolate wisdom, and with those eyes that seemed to banish and scatter into the vanity of time all the bitter and vexing contingencies of life. It will pass, my dear friends... it will pass . Pirandello the novelist is entirely subordinate to Pirandello the playwright. This trait is particularly pronounced in the second half of the book, where the narrative erupts into rigorous, tight, impassioned dialogues between characters who seem to perform upon a stage. In the first part, while one cannot speak of Pirandello as a *verista* or a social writer in the vein of Zola, the prose succeeds admirably in conveying the tragic essence of Sicily—a profound, infinite sorrow for a desolate land once resonant with life and culture. Why read it? It remains an acutely relevant book, for it portrays the Italy of today as well.

Duca Lamberti is a physician struck off the medical register for having ended the life of a terminally ill patient; he has been released from prison and is offered a singular job: to rid the young scion of a prominent industrialist, Davide Auseri, of his alcoholism. > It was a sweet face, like a page’s, yet virile, untouched as yet by alcohol.(...) What expression did that face have? He searched for it, and then remembered what expression it was: that of a boy taking an important exam, unable to answer a question—an expression of anguish and timidity, and a few pathetic attempts to appear natural . Though perplexed, Lamberti accepts the assignment because > he is the prince of social redemption ventures, the duke, ah, what humour: freeing humanity (...) from the scourge of alcoholism; freeing humanity from the fear of death . There is also a second motive, lurking deep within the soul, in that interior world from which we always seek to escape: > the onslaught of thoughts, of memories, but when the tide rolled in, it submerged him and battered him far more than he had ever feared. All right, move on, he had gotten everything wrong . The first part of the novel seems redundant compared to a "noir > , which tells of the Milan of prostitution, immoral blackmail, and the ruthless violence inflicted upon naive, fragile girls. The premise frames the figure of Duca Lamberti, a former physician turned makeshift investigator, who finds in the police inquiry the solution to the causes of young Davide's alcoholism and, simultaneously, discovers a purpose for his own life. Thus emerges a character plunging into the abyss of an upwardly mobile, wealthy, and seemingly happy Milan. Everything was going filthily wrong in ways the placid, efficient Milanese (...) could not imagine, even if every day in the *Corriere* they read major stories of that kind; yet to them they belonged to a fourth dimension of an Einstein of crime, even more incomprehensible than the Einstein of physics." At this point the "noir > , whose plot we will certainly not recount, let alone its conclusion, can begin. Scerbanenco brings Raymond Chandler to mind (see the review of *The Long Goodbye*). As with the great American writer, the noir is a "non-noir" > . The order that characterizes the detective novel is absent; we are not in the presence of a solid plot that resolves into a triumph of good over evil. Everything remains opaque. Consider the novel's heroine: Livia Ussaro. Duca is drawn to her ( distinguishing marks: the way she looked at him was not in the least fair > ), yet he exposes her to the point where the girl will be scarred by the criminals, and Lamberti waits, failing to intervene to save her. "Enough now," he too thought of Livia, or was it a prayer, more than a thought. (...) "Do we really have to stay right here and wait > . (...) Shut up, shut up, why did he always have to get involved in dead-end situations, in eternal principles. (...) When someone had a sick head like his, he knew no bounds . As Luca Doninelli writes in the preface, in Duca Lamberti there is a melancholy > that stems from a gaze more disenchanted (I would even dare say: more cynical) than that of the criminals. (...) He is not good, thank God: he merely sees further, and is not afraid to look. He sees as far as there is to see. The charm of the novel lies in the writing: reading just a few pages is enough to be captivated by the elegance of the language and the melancholic sweetness of Scerbanenco’s Italian. I highly recommend the account of the poor girl’s entrapment, a victim of criminal machinations. As the poet says, speaking of the sad fate of a spider lured by a swallow, > the festively adorned stars,/call to him softly,/and let fall traces/visible to weeping,/while they veil the snowy/enchantment of their faces . (Enrico Cavacchioli, *Il ragno*). With the same poetic register, Scerbanenco conjures a muted atmosphere, a sadness that overwhelms and fascinates us. (The review of *L'isola degli idealisti* can be read on this site). Why read it? Let us be enthralled by the writing.

> It was the wildest parade in modern history: in uniforms alone, there was enough for a hundred carnivals. (...) Alongside the men marched the female partisans, dressed in men’s clothes, and here someone in the crowd began to murmur—Ah, poor Italy!—because these girls had faces and a gait that set all the townspeople winking . The partisans’ conquest of Alba lasted less than a month, and Fenoglio traces a realistic chronicle of it, devoid of rhetoric; at its center lies the contradictory nature of man. > But they weren't all whoring, of course; in fact, most were out commandeering cars, tires, and petrol. Not without quarreling among themselves with their safeties off, they tracked down and seized a great number of automobiles, with which they began a thrilling driving school along the ring road . Yet why does one become a partisan? To understand Fenoglio’s answer to this question, one must reverse the order of the stories, starting from the final ones, which seem ostensibly removed from the events of the liberation war. In *Pioggia e la Sposa*, a young boy is dragged by his aunt to a wedding, despite the torrential rain, which forces him (a «city-dressed boy») to cover himself with his priest-cousin’s hat. We understand that the boy has lost his mother; he is alone, and his aunt, stern and surly, is his only source of affection: > I saw that her eyes, together with her hand, grazed my soaked hair, and this time her hand was relaxed and tender, just as my mother’s hand had always been, and even her eyes seemed extraordinarily kind toward me, and less dark . Solitude turns into an anticipation of death in *L’odore della morte*: the protagonist, now a grown man, happens upon a girl and begins following her, merely to pass the time. He is attacked by her fiancé, but during the struggle he felt > that smell (...) already everywhere inside, having passed through his nostrils, his mouth, and his pores, unstoppable as the very power that distilled it; it must have already enfolded his brain, for he felt mad . In the other stories that do not deal with the partisan struggle, solitude, the prosaic nature, and the futility of life are recurring themes; flight, the resignation to an unhappy fate, and in some cases even suicide seem to be the only possible outcomes of the human condition. Thus, the choice to become a partisan is not the fruit of ideals; it is, rather, a revolt against an existence devoid of prospects. In the story *Un altro muro*, Max has been captured by the Fascists; he dreams of «the face of his corpse» and shouts to his cellmate: > do you feel up to dying for the idea? I don't. And what idea, anyway? If you search inside yourself, do you find the idea? I don't. And neither do you . At that moment > he hated his friends and comrades; he saw them that night roaming the high hills, free and masters of their own lives, armed, untroubled, and proud; he saw the hills illuminated as if by day by the moonlight on the frozen snow; he felt the wind coming in from the sea, sweeping through the great pass between the Apennines and the Alps . It is not the ideals of Justice and Freedom that move the partisans, but the desire for a primordial freedom: an indecipherable mixture of pent-up energy, of a longing for change, of standing alongside others on the right side. Yet partisan life does not resolve existential predicaments: either because death arrives too soon, or because war brings further violence and destruction in its wake. And in the end, once the liberation has been achieved, returning to a normal life is no longer possible and, as in *Ettore va al lavoro*, one knows only how to embrace the gun once more and go rob former Fascists. All the stories are remarkable, but one is especially so: *Gli inizi del partigiano Raoul*. > He intended to take Raoul as his nom de guerre. Along a completely deserted road he walked with a light heart; despite having left his widowed mother alone back in the village, he felt like nobody’s son—and that is the ideal condition for doing the two truly grave and hard things for an individual: going to war and emigrating . His headlong courage soon turns into revulsion at the life that awaits him: > what good is my education to me? Here, to hold out, you have to become a brute! And I don’t have it in me, I am good! Oh mama, mama! He thought back to dawn that very same day—could it really have been only eight hours ago? At night he regains his confidence while standing sentry, but when his watch ends and he finds himself back in a squalid, cavernous room, the sense of wretchedness returns, followed by fear. > How could the others sleep with such abandon? Were they certain they would live to see the morning? (...) The barn door flew open with a resounding bang, and the doorway filled with men clad entirely in black, as if masked from head to foot. (...) The beams of light terminated in white circles like so many tiny moons, zeroing in one by one on the faces of all the partisans. Whether due to that artificial light or something else, they were already all faces of corpses, with motionless eyelids and wide-open eyes. (...) Delio asked him—Slept well for your first time? There was a hint of malice in his voice.... È lʼincubo di un semplice ragazzo, non di un eroe. Fenoglio’s writing is consummate, now mature and confident. It loses certain idiosyncratic traits, such as the richness of idiom and the quest for neologisms. At times, it feels as though one were reading Cesare Pavese. Why read it? Magnificent stories: a mirror of the human condition.