Italian literature

“I am merely the canvas on which women paint their dreams.” (Rudolph Valentino)

/ madamebibilophile / 14 Comments

I’m going through a bit of a reading slump at the moment, not a terrible one as I’m finding I can focus on my comfort reads, but I’m struggling with anything that needs more concentration. It’s very frustrating.

I wanted to take part in August’s Women in Translation Month, so I was hoping to recover my reading mojo in time. Having enjoyed All Our Yesterdays and The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg previously, I thought her direct style would suit my addled brain well. Valentino (1957 transl. Avril Bardoni 1987)) is essentially a short story, just 62 pages in my edition (a Daunt Books reissue) and I whizzed through it on a short train journey to visit a friend in Sussex.

The story is narrated by Caterina, sister of the titular character:

“My father believed that [Valentino] was destined to become a man of consequence. There was little enough reason to believe this, but he believed it all the same and had done ever since Valentino was a small boy and perhaps found it difficult to break the habit.”

Valentino is vain and feckless, entirely undeserving of the faith his parents put in him and the sacrifices the whole family have made to finance his medical studies. He fritters away his time and routinely gets engaged to ‘teenagers wearing jaunty little berets’.

So when he announces his latest engagement, no-one takes it particularly seriously:

“It had happened so often already that when he announced he was getting married within the month nobody believed him, and my mother cleaned the dining room wearily and put on the grey silk reserved for her pupils’ examinations at the Conservatory and for meeting Valentino’s perspective brides.”

However, this engagement to Maddelena sticks. She is older, unattractive and incredibly rich. Valentino’s parents are heartbroken at his avariciousness being made so apparent. Caterina is more equanimous and she soon realises that Maddelena is caring and hard-working. Valentino is not worthy of his bride.

“It was not easy to explain to my sister Clara the turn that events had taken. That a woman had appeared with lashings of money and a moustache who was willing to pay for the privilege of marrying Valentino and that he had agreed.”

What follows is a carefully realised study of the family members and their dynamics, particularly around Valentino’s marriage. Caterina’s direct voice conveys the hurt Valentino inflicts, not through cruelty but through utter obliviousness and self-focus, without demonising him.

In such a short space, Ginzburg achieves a really moving portrait of familial relationships and how these exist under the pressures exerted by society.  There is sadness in the tale but also a deadpan humour. Caterina presents the situation without judgement, enabling a real depth to the characterisation.

Ginzburg is such an intelligent, insightful writer who never seeks to alienate readers with her cleverness. She presents knotty complexity with a deceptive simplicity of style. If you’ve never read her, Valentino is a good place to start.

“My emotions at that time were neither profound nor melancholic and I was confident that sooner or later things would improve for me.”

To end, Rudolph Valentino playing ‘a youthful libertine’ and dancing a tango, over 100 years ago:

“Everything that mattered had happened already” (Natalia Ginzburg)

/ madamebibilophile / 27 Comments

Last year I read All Our Yesterdays, which was my first experience of Natalia Ginzburg’s writing, and I absolutely loved her unfussy, direct style. The Dry Heart (1947 transl. Frances Frenaye 1952) is a much shorter work at just 108 pages but it packs a real punch.

On the first page, the unnamed narrator is with her husband in their home:

“I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes. But for a long time already I had known that sooner or later I should do something of the sort.”

And so this is a whydunit rather than a whodunit, as we are taken back to a time when a young, naïve girl marries a man who she knows does not love her:

“When a girl is very much alone and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence, with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenceless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her.”

Initially her husband Alberto is interested in her, but not romantically. He reads Rilke to her and listens to all she has to say. But he is in love with Giovanna and he never pretends otherwise. They marry despite ambivalence on both sides.

She has friends, including Francesca who lives more independently and freely; and Augusto who is her husband’s friend but also kind and genuine towards her.  Yet the narrator still seems very isolated, and lonely within her marriage. Alberto obfuscates and disregards her feelings. Who she is and how his behaviour impacts on her is of no consequence to him.  

“I wanted to know a lot more about his feelings for me, but I couldn’t talk to him for long about anything important because it bored him to try and get to the bottom of things and turn them over and over the way I did.”

The simple, direct language lends itself to the length of the novella and also emphasises youth of narrator. The complexity of The Dry Heart lies in the characterisation and builds an intriguing portrait of a marriage.

Despite having undertaken such a violent act, the narrator doesn’t ask for sympathy, and doesn’t justify herself. She presents what happened without a trace of sentimentality or self-pity. Possibly she is detached and deeply traumatised, but as the reader comes to her at the point of the shooting, we don’t know if this voice is one of trauma or long-established.

By refusing to have the narrator engage in self-justification and avoiding any sense of authorial knowingness or psychological explanation, Ginzburg firmly places the why in the readers hands. It’s a masterstroke: she highlights patriarchal oppression, psychological warfare in marriage, the pitiable choices available for women and the danger of dismissing fellow human beings, without being remotely heavy-handed.    

The Dry Heart is hugely impressive and I’m looking forward to exploring Ginzburg further, thanks to the wonderful Daunt Books who are doing such a great job reissuing her work in translation.

“It’s probably a mistake to follow every meandering of our feelings and waste time listening to every echo from within. That, in fact, is no way to live.”

To end, from a dry heart to a cold one:

“Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing” (Giorgio Bassani)

/ madamebibilophile / 18 Comments

This is my final post for the 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, which has been running all week. It’s been a great event as always, and I’m really pleased it prompted me to pick the three I’ve read off the TBR pile at long last!

(Please note, despite the subject matter I’ve made a deliberate choice not to draw contemporary parallels. I think Lisa explained this decision really well in her blog post here.)

I adored Giorgio Bassani’s The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (1958) when I read it last year, so I had high expectations when I approached The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (transl. Jamie McKendrick, 2007), the third book in his Romanzo di Ferrara cycle. It fully lived up to those expectations.

The unnamed narrator tells us in the Prologue that he is looking back from 1957 to a time before World War II. However the tone is more elegiac than nostalgic, as he also tells us that those he recalls perished in concentration camps.

Before the war the Finzi-Continis were a prosperous family, but the conflict destroyed them and all they owned. The large house is now squatted in, and the titular space:

“All the broad-canopied trees, limes, elms, beeches, poplars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, pines, firs, larches, cedars of Lebanon, cypresses, oaks, holm oaks, and even the palm trees and eucalyptuses planted in their hundreds by Josette Artom during the last two years of the first world war, were cut down for firewood, and for some time the land had returned to the state it was in when Moisè Finzi-Contini acquired it”

So it is with this knowledge that we then meet the younger, somewhat callow narrator, and follow his developing friendship with the younger Finzi-Contini’s, Alberto and Micòl, son and daughter of Professor Ermanno and Signor Olga.

Racial laws are coming into effect in Italy in the late 1930s, and this sees the narrator invited into the walled estate, as Jewish people are banned from places such as the local tennis club.

“They entirely left aside the existence of a far greater intimacy, a secret one, to be valued only by those who shared it, which derived from the fact that our two families, not by choice, but by virtue of a tradition more ancient than any possible memory, belonged to the same religious observance, or more accurately to the same ’School’”

Despite the growing pressures of the outside world, within the Finzi-Continis walls the narrator remembers a time where:

“The weather remained perfect, held in that state of magical suspension, of glassy, luminous, soft immobility which is the special gift of some of our autumns. In the garden it was hot, just slightly less than if it was summer.”

In this enchanted space the narrator falls for Micòl, but their relationship never develops, characterised by misunderstandings and ambiguity that they are too young to resolve. Being too young for what life throws at you is also shown through the political conversations with Giampi Malnate, an older Christian friend of Alberto, as well as an experience of terminal illness.

What I thought was so subtle and clever from Bassani is that nothing overly dramatic happens. Rather, things fade out. The huge events that we know are looming take place outside of the novel, and instead we are shown how we can take for granted the moments that seemingly have no wider ramifications. Except of course, they do. This is a formative time for the narrator.  

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is not a plot-driven novel. It is a beautifully written evocation of a time before unimagined horrors. It is reflective and elegiac in tone without ever letting sentimentality lessen the portrait of a family obliterated by the Holocaust. It’s a truly devastating read.

The novel was adapted into a film in 1970, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar that year. Has anyone seen it? It looks pretty faithful to the book so I’m interested to watch it:

“I think of a writer as a river: you reflect what passes before you.” (Natalia Ginzburg)

/ madamebibilophile / 26 Comments

A desperate scrabbling attempt to get a final post written for Women in Translation Month!

Daunt Books are such an interesting publisher and I was keen to read Natalia Ginzburg having heard wonderful things in the blogosphere, so I swooped on All Our Yesterdays (1952, transl. Angus Davidson 1956) when it turned up in my local charity bookshop. I think I’d read somewhere that this wasn’t the best place to start with this author, but I absolutely loved it.

The novel follows two families living in a northern Italian town from the 1930s, through the war years to peacetime. Although the blurb on the French flaps of my edition suggests Anna, the daughter of the poorer family, is the protagonist, really Ginzburg follows them all to a greater or lesser extent, with no overarching plot other than the sequence of years.

Although this approach sounds like a shortcoming, it works so well. It’s not a documentary novel but it gestures towards this with an omniscient neutral(ish) viewpoint and only reported speech. This felt unusual to read, but is so clever in capturing the everyday experiences of those living through extraordinary circumstances.

Anna’s siblings are Concettina, Ippolito, and Giustino. Concettina is popular with boys but struggles to find a purpose in life; Ippolito channels his energies into anti-Fascist activities with his friend from the richer family across the road:

“Emanuele and Ippolito did not even know Italy, they had never seen anything except their own little town, and they imagined the whole of Italy to be like their own little town, an Italy of teachers and accountants with a few workmen thrown in, but even the workmen and the accountants became rather like teachers in their imagination.”

Their lives are equally dictated by world events and by commonplace ones. Anna falls pregnant by her boyfriend and marries an eccentric older man, Cenzo Rena, moving with him to the southern village of Borgo San Costanzo. Her affair with her self-involved, callow boyfriend was no great passion, and while her marriage to Cenzo Rena attracts approbation, he is a warmer, more generous man than the one her own age.

“She was alone with Giuma’s face that gave her a stab of pain in her heart, and every day she would be going back with Giuma amongst the bushes on the river bank, every day she would see again that face with the rumpled forelock and the tightly closed eyelids, that face that had lost all trace both of words and of thoughts of her.”

These are people destined to be on the outskirts of war. Cenzo Rena holds a lot of sway in his local area and does help Jewish people fleeing the Nazi occupation, but on the whole the story of All Our Yesterdays is not one involving soldiers or revolutionaries. It is about ordinary people and for them the conflicts of war are reported facts not lived experience. The latter for them includes a lot of mundanity:

“And the bread in town was rationed and was a kind of soft, grey dough that you couldn’t ever digest, the bread was like the soap and the soap was like the bread, both washing and eating had become very difficult.”

Yet this doesn’t mean the story isn’t affecting, or that the characters avoid tragedy. There are some truly tragic events that are hugely affecting. Ginzburg manages to be even-handed in her treatment of her characters but not detached. Her writing is warm but unsentimental as she demonstrates that flawed people are as worthy of love and mourning as idealised ones.

In case I’ve made it sound unremittingly serious, I should mention that there humour in All Our Yesterdays too. There are romantic entanglements that are treated with a degree of levity, and eccentric housekeepers/family retainers with various foibles. All life is here.

I can’t think of another writer who approaches Ginzburg’s style, and looking back on it I can’t explain how she does what she does. This was a story that snuck up on me, the deceptively simple storytelling drawing me in more than I realised until I was totally immersed. An extraordinary novel.

“Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was away fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exultation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water.”

To end, of course there’s a very famous song I could post on the theme of Yesterday, but instead, to continue the mix of despair alongside levity: have you seen a parrot singing Creep by Radiohead?

Novella a Day in May 2022 No.29

/ madamebibilophile / 15 Comments

The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles – Giorgio Bassani (1958 trans. Jamie McKendrick 2012) 125 pages

I’ve been meaning to read Giorgio Bassani for a while and have The Garden of the Finzi-Continis in the TBR. This project in May seemed the ideal opportunity to read the first of his novels set in Ferrara, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles. From this first encounter I can say I found Bassani to be a truly devastating writer.

The titular eyewear belongs to Dr Athos Fadigati, who has left Venice to settle in Ferrara. His story is told by a narrator looking back to when he was a young man and knew the doctor:

“It was in 1919, just after the other war. Because of my age, I who write this can only offer a rather vague and confused picture of that period. The town centre caffes spilt over with officers in uniform; lorries bedecked with flags continually passed by […] in front of the north face of the castle, a huge, scarlet advertising banner had been unfurled, inviting the friends and enemies of Socialism to come together to drink APERITIF LENIN”

The doctor is well-liked in the town, affable and competent at his work, a breath of fresh air after the old-fashioned medics previously available. In a small town though, people take an interest in everyone’s business, and no-one can work out why Dr Fadigati is single, or where he goes of an evening. When they realise he is gay, no-one cares so long as he is discreet. An insidious homophobia that can easily become explicit and threatening.  

“Yes – they said – now that his secret was no longer a secret, now that everything was as clear as could be, at least one could be sure how to behave towards him. By day, in the light of the sun, to show him every respect; in the evening, even if pressed chest to chest against him in the throng of Via San Romano, to show no sign of recognising him.”

Dr Fadigati starts commuting to Bologna along with the young university students of the town. He is such a sweet, kind man, who only wants to connect with others.

“He was happy, in the end, with the least thing, or so it seemed. He wanted no more than to stay there, in our third-class compartment, with the air of an old man silently warming his hands in front of a big fire.”

Unfortunately, the students – who have known him and been cared for by him their whole lives – do not always behave well: “little by little, without meaning to, all of us began to show him scant respect”. This includes a humiliating exchange with one of the young men, Deliliers, who doesn’t respect the doctor’s privacy and alludes to his sexuality in derogatory ways.

Things escalate during the annual family holiday to Riccione. The narrator sees the doctor and Deliliers together, and the town can no longer ignore the doctor’s sexuality. Around the same time, the narrator faces increasing antisemitism, demonstrated by fellow holiday-maker Signora Lavezzoli’s support of Hitler. The family find themselves treading a similar tightrope to the one Dr Fadigati has had to navigate, trying to stay safe amongst a discriminatory and prejudiced society.

“Romantic, patriotic, politically naive and inexperienced like so many Jews of his generation, my father, returning from the Front in 1919, had also enrolled in the Fascist Party. He had thus been a Fascist ‘from the very beginning’, and at heart had remained one despite his meekness and honesty. But since Mussolini, after the early scuffles, had begun to reach an agreement with Hitler, my father had started to feel uneasy.”

The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles makes full use of the reader’s knowledge of history. It is a deeply upsetting read, showing how quickly unspoken prejudice can escalate and be supported by wider political and legal frameworks. It demonstrates how easy it is for ordinary people to become part of widespread evil – one of the narrator’s friends decides to join the government, not through any ideological belief but because it is a useful opportunity. The ease with which it happens and the casual acceptance of the racial laws, is horribly believable.

Bassani uses the story of Dr Fadigati to fully drive home the consequences of the rise of Fascism and Nazism. It’s remarkable in portraying the tragedy that ensues in a deeply emotional but also carefully restrained way.

“The setting sun, cleaving through a dark cope of cloud that lay low on the horizon, vividly lit up everything: the Jewish cemetery at my feet the apse and bell tower of the Church of San Cristoforo only a little further on, and in the background high above the vista of brown roofs, the distant bulk of the Estense Castle and the Duomo. It was enough for me to recover the ancient, maternal visage of my hometown, to reclaim it once again all for myself, that atrocious feeling of exclusion that had tormented me in the last days to fall away instantly. The future of persecution and massacres that perhaps awaited us – since childhood I had heard them spoken of as always a possible eventuality for us Jews – no longer made me afraid.”

I’m so glad I finally picked up Bassani and I’ll be returning to him for sure. Just as soon as I’ve recovered from this novella, which could take some time…

Novella a Day in May 2022 No.22

/ madamebibilophile / 11 Comments

Troubling Love – Elena Ferrante (1992 trans. Anne Goldstein 2006) 139 pages

Although the popularity of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet baffled me a bit, I had better luck with her stand-alone novella The Lost Daughter.  This meant I was keen to try Troubling Love, and having finished it I did think that maybe I should give the quartet another try…

Delia’s mother Amalia has died in odd circumstances – drowned, found wearing only her bra, a glamourous one that Delia thinks it out of keeping with her mother’s style. As she returns home to Naples from Rome for the funeral, Delia finds herself reflecting on her past and trying to piece together what happened with her mother, both then and more recently.

“The streets of topographic memory seemed to me unstable, like a carbonated drink that, if shaken, bubbles up and overflows. I felt the city coming apart in the heat, in the dusty grey light, and I went over in my mind the story of childhood and adolescence that impelled me to wander along the Veterinaria to the Botanic Gardens, or over the cobbles of the market of Sant’Antonio Abate, which were always damp and strewn with rotting vegetables.”

Delia reflects on her childhood and her abusive father, who possessively and violently guarded his attractive wife. Delia’s memories of her painful home life are conflicted and contradictory. She despises her father but also harbours a lot of anger and resentment towards her mother.

“We, on the other hand, thought that our father, because of everything he did to her, should leave the house one morning and be burned to death or crushed or drowned. We thought it and hated her, because she was the linchpin of these thoughts.”

The past and present become overlaid as Delia visits her (still violent) father and meets a childhood friend she hasn’t seen in years. She chases a man through the streets thinking he has the answers as to what her mother was doing before she died. As she explores further, memory and identity become confused and less clearly delineated.

“Sometimes that place, which belonged to a less reliable memory, consisted of a dimly lighted staircase and a wrought-iron banister. At other times it was a patch of light striped by bars and covered by a fine screen, which I observed crouching underground, in the company of a child named Antonio, who held me tightly by the hand. The sounds that accompanied it, like the soundtrack of a film, were pure commotion, sudden banging, as of things formerly in order that abruptly collapse.”

Troubling Love isn’t so much a mystery story as an exploration of grief, memory, identity, and the slippery nature of all of these things. It doesn’t offer easy answers. It looks at how so much of this is bound up with family, and how this can be difficult to reconcile.

“Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense: at least, mine was like that.”

Troubling Love was adapted to film in 1995. I’ve not seen it, but the trailer looks faithful:

Novella a Day in May 2022 No.1

/ madamebibilophile / 25 Comments

It’s always with some trepidation that I start a Novella a Day in May project. Last year I couldn’t face it at all (pandemic testing my resilience, work pressure, cat deaths taking a toll – even so I know I’ve been very lucky). But I seem to be able to read more now, so fingers crossed…

Also, I never run NADIM as an event because I never thought anyone else would want to undertake such a task, but I’m delighted that this year I will be joined by Simon at Stuck in a Book! So do join us for lots of novella love 😊

Away we go!

Without Blood – Alessandro Baricco (2002, trans. Ann Goldstein 2004) 87 pages

Without Blood is a short, sharp shock. It opens with a brutal, bloody and deadly attack on Nina’s family when she is a small child.

Men arrive at the remote farmhouse where she lives with her father and brother. Her father helps her to hide  in the cellar, but she hears them accuse him of the torture of prisoners during the (unnamed) war.

“Nina closed her eyes. She flattened herself against the blanket, and curled up even tighter, pulling her knees to her chest. She liked to be in that position. She felt the earth, cool, under her side, protecting her – it would not betray her. And she felt her own curled up body, folded around itself like a shell.”

Her brother fires a gun at the men and is killed. One of the soldiers, a young man called Tito, sees Nina under the trapdoor and keeps quiet. Nina is taken in by a local man who then bets her away at cards when she is a teenager. Adult Nina devotes herself to revenging the death of her family.

Barrico raises a lot of big questions in this novella but wisely doesn’t attempt to find answers. The nature and purpose of war; who is guilty and to what extent; the brutalisation of humans; the justification and consequences of violence; revenge versus redemption…

“There were a lot of things we had to destroy in order to build what we wanted, there was no other way, we had to be able to suffer and to inflict suffering – whoever could endure more pain would win, you cannot dream of a better world and think it will be delivered just because you ask for it.”

When Nina finds Tito fifty-two years later, it is not easy to predict what will happen. They have both been irrevocably changed by the events of that night, events which have overshadowed the rest of their lives and bound them together throughout their separation.

“The man thought the way she spoke was strange. As if it was a gesture she wasn’t used to.”

It is a quick read in length but Without Blood invites longer consideration.

Novella a Day in May 2020 #25

/ madamebibilophile / 25 Comments

The Beautiful Summer – Cesare Pavese (1949, trans. WJ Strachan 1955) 101 pages

Thinking back to when I bought The Beautiful Summer seems so foreign now even though it was at Birmingham New Street station. It’s unusual for me to buy a new book, I usually go to charity shops. But I’d finished my book on the train journey in so I needed something for the journey back. That book was Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, and in WHSmith I could get it with The Beautiful Summer half price (it’s part of Penguin’s European Writers Series). The thought of being in such a huge public space with people milling around, and wandering into a shop to browse and purchase on a whim seems a lifetime ago…

The Beautiful Summer opens with sixteen year old shop assistant Ginia enjoying the feeling that “Life was a perpetual holiday” in 1930s Turin. On the cusp of adulthood, she is also frustrated at knowing there is more life to be had,  most likely away from her friends.

“Rosa was indispensable; with her easy, familiar ways and her high spirits she made Ginia’s superiority plain to the rest of the company.”

Ginia takes up with the older Amelia, an artist’s model, and her free-living friends. Ginia is both intrigued and intimidated:

“the excitement at the discovery that they were both made in the same mould and whoever had seen Amelia naked was really seeing her. She began to feel terribly ill at ease.”

Ginia falls for Guido, an artist who seems to do very little painting, if at all. Her naivete is almost painful to witness:

“He likes me a sweetheart; he loves me. He did not believe I was seventeen, but he kissed my eyes; I am a grown-up woman now”

As the summer progresses, so does their affair, and Ginia grows up. The story of The Beautiful Summer is a tale oft told, of lost innocence, heartache, and learning who you are as you forge your own path. What lifts it above cliché is the compassionate characterisation of Ginia, the non-judgemental portrayals of young people who do not always behave well, and the sense of sad survival rather than devastation.

“Ginia knew he would never marry her, however fond she was of him. She had known this from that evening when she first offered herself to him.”

To end, a Brummie band in honour of my copy’s origins (OK, a blatant excuse for a Duran Duran video as I don’t generally indulge my love of 80s pop during my NADIM posts.) Apparently Simon Le Bon nearly drowned filming this; they should have strapped John Taylor to the windmill instead, I’m sure the buoyancy of his hair would have kept him afloat:

Novella a Day in May 2019 #29

/ madamebibilophile / 16 Comments

Pinocchio – Carlo Collodi (1883, trans. Geoffrey Beck 2009) 160 pages

Pinocchio, like a lot of classic children’s literature, is deeply weird and dark. I didn’t read it at all as a child, despite seeing the Disney cartoon which is very different. I picked it up as an adult because its published by the ever reliable NYRB Classics, and it turned out to be an intriguing read.

The basic premise I think everyone knows: a wooden puppet comes to life, wants to be a real boy, misbehaves and every lie he tells has a very obvious effect on his physiognomy.

“ ‘Lies, my boy, are immediately recognizable, for there are two kinds: lies that have short legs and lies that have long noses. Yours happen to be the long-nosed variety.’

Pinocchio, wanting to hide his face in shame, tried to run from the room – but he couldn’t. His nose was so long that it wouldn’t fit through the doorway.”

Pinocchio isn’t very likeable. He’s totally idle and only interested in himself.

“ ‘Of all the trades in the world, there’s only one that really suits me.’

‘And what trade would that be?’

‘That of eating, drinking, sleeping, playing, and wandering wherever I like from sunup to sundown.’

‘For your information,’ said the Talking Cricket, with his usual calm, ‘everyone who plies that trade ends up either in a poorhouse or a prison.’

‘Watch out, you doom-and-gloom Cricket! If I snap, you’ll be sorry!’”

Pinocchio does snap, and kills the Cricket stone dead. A short-lived relationship with an insect, who is nothing like the top hat and frock coat wearing, enduring friend of the cartoon.

The story is episodic, with Pinocchio going on several adventures, invariably taking the wrong decision, and failing to learn from his mistakes. It has the feel of folk tales rather than fairy tales, being grounded in an earthy reality of poverty and banditry, even when the bandits are a fox and cat double act. Pinocchio is always appealing even though he is selfish and unheeding, but there is never any sentimentality in the tale.

However, there is the strong didactic element associated with fairy tales, and Pinocchio is constantly lectured, by the cricket, by adults, and by the fairy with sky blue hair who crops up in various guises.

“ ‘Dear boy,’ said the Fairy, ‘people who talk that way almost always end up either in a prison or a poorhouse. For your information, everyone, whether they’re born rich or poor, is obliged to do something – to keep busy, to work. Woe to anyone who yields to idleness! Idleness is a dreadful disease and must be treated at once, starting in childhood. If not, it will be too late by the time we grow up.’”

Pinocchio does eventually learn and does become a real boy, but there’s something irrepressible about him. The feeling at the end is not of conservative integration where all is right with the world, but rather that the subversive elements that have been present all along are still there, waiting to spill out at any minute.

It’s a tale that can be enjoyed by children and adults. My edition included contributions from intellectual heavyweights to say the least: an Introduction by Umberto Eco, an Afterword by Rebecca West and a quote on the back by Italo Calvino. This shows how Pinocchio has been so widely recognised and why it endures; deceptively simple, hiding its complexities in an engaging children’s tale, it can be read differently each time.

I really didn’t like the cover of the NYRB Classics edition, finding it creepy, but it captures the unsettling quality of the tale of an animated puppet perfectly:

Novella a Day in May #8

/ madamebibilophile / 12 Comments

The Disappearance of Signora Giulia – Piero Chiara (1970, trans. Jill Foulston 2015) 122 pages

The Disappearance of Signora Giulia was initially published in an Italian newspaper as a serial and is now available in English translation thanks to Pushkin, as part of their Vertigo imprint. It is a quick, snappy crime thriller that does not aim for trite resolution but rather an exploration beneath the surface of a life to the murky depths.

Corrado Sciancalelpre is “blessed with a special form of intuition, that peculiar mental agility that enables great policemen to delve into the minds of criminals.”

Thankfully, he is also happy married and liked in the town in northern Lombardy where he works – no tortured alcoholic with a secret past here.

A powerful lawyer, Esengrini, asks Sciancalelpre to investigate the titular vanishing of his wife. Every Thursday, Guilia has been going to Milan to visit their daughter at boarding school, but now she has failed to return and two bags of her things are missing too. Sciancalelpre agrees and what follows is essentially a police procedural, but the short length of the story ensures the pacing remains tight.

Sciancalelpre is resolutely unsentimental but not without sympathy. The more he investigates, the more he feels for the missing woman:

“He didn’t say ‘Poor Signora Giulia to Esengrini when he visited him in his office every few days towards evening. With Esengrini, he spoke only of the undeniably disappointing results of a search conducted throughout the whole of Italy with Signora Giulia’s photo.”

It’s impossible to say much more about a crime novella without including spoilers. Suffice to say there are plenty of red herrings, people and relationships who are not what they seem. The Disappearance of Signora Giulia is a diverting read, when you’re in the mood for a crime novel you’ll finish quickly. It is not a simple tale though, and the resolution is a complex one that leaves questions unanswered. This wasn’t a source of frustration but rather felt realistic.

I really enjoyed this, Chiara’s first novel to be translated into English despite his huge popularity in Italy, and I hope there will be many more translations to follow.