Book 11: Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe, 1940)

This is the kind of novel I would ordinarily avoid. I read it because it seemed "important" in the history of Italian literature, not because I thought I'd truly enjoy it.

It's mentioned frequently, almost reverentially, usually with that overused word "masterpiece." It's even listed on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century (which of course you have to take with a grain of salt, seeing as how most of the "best books of the century" turn out to be French, according to the coincidentally —bien sûr! —French Le Monde).

The reason — maybe indefensible — that I'd avoid it is because it seemed to be a "concept" novel — more philosophy than literature, more theory than life, more types than characters, addressing in sterile, anonymous fashion "ideas" of Nothingness and Man's Aloneness in the World.

I had a philosophy instructor once who told me he found discussions about God's existence or nonexistence, and all related concepts, supremely tedious and self-indulgent. "Whatever the answer may be," he said, "I am still going to go home and eat a good dinner." Amen. A good dinner is so much more interesting than an endless, pompous argument or a volume of illustrated concepts passing as a novel. A good dinner — in all its fine detail — is the stuff of literature.

So I was surprised — humbled, chastened — to discover that Dino Buzzati's "Tartar Steppe" is an honest-to-God novel and not just a philosophy text masquerading as literature. The big concepts are definitely there; they're just gracefully integrated into the characters' lives so that, you know, you actually relate to them and care about them.

The plot concerns a young soldier who is stationed at a remote fort. He thinks the assignment is temporary, that it's his first stop on the way to military glory. The fort overlooks a desert, the so-called Tartar steppe, from which enemies once posed a threat of invasion, but the desert has been silent and harmless for ages. Even though the possibility for invasion is virtually nil, the vast, empty expanse exercises a sinister hold on the soldiers' imaginations — it's a big blank slate that might yield opportunity for heroic battle or that might, like life itself, consume your youth while you stand there dumbly staring at it. And trying to figure out what to do with it and what the heck it means.

The latter is what happens to our young soldier Drogo. He is more or less tricked, by others and then by himself, into staying at the pointless fort, into submitting to a life of meaningless military discipline. I wondered if the makers of "Jarhead" had read this, because that film is eerily similar in its focus on "waiting for war." Ha Jin's novel "Waiting" came to mind, too — the dreary fate of pleasures too long anticipated. I also wondered whether George R.R. Martin named his Dothraki khal Drogo in "Game of Thrones" after Buzzati's character. The two have little in common other than the warrior identity, but "Game" has a Wall that functions much like the fort; it overlooks a vast wasteland and is meant to keep the bad guys away from the good, but, of course, the bad guys are already here — they're us — and no wall or fort can keep them out. The bad guys are the things within us that make us believe that pointless self-sacrifice is more noble than villas by the seashore and soft summer nights and charming women and beautiful music — the things of Drogo's daydreams as he keeps watch at the fort.

Drogo stays year after year, then decade after decade, fixated on the threat beyond the desert and persevering "in his illusion that the really important things of life are still before him." There's still time. There's still time. And then — suddenly — there's no time. Drogo has wasted his whole life waiting for "the enemy." When he could have been sitting down to good dinners.

And when finally, near the end, something does stir in the desert, Drogo is too weary, too sapped, too disillusioned to be of use. In the last pages, in the most poignant image in the book, Drogo, forced to retire from the fort, sees a sleeping child at an inn, and remembers that "he too had been a thing of grace and innocence, and perhaps an old, sick officer (like himself) had stopped to look at him with bitter astonishment."

Bitter astonishment. What a phrase. I bet in Italian it's rendered as some vowel-filled lyrical incantation that belies its utter sadness.

—————

Buzzati, from San Pellegrino in northern Italy, is interesting for the variety of his creative achievements. He didn't just write a "masterpiece" of 20th century fiction. He was also a librettist, a journalist and an acclaimed artist. He wrote a classic children's book called "The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily" (which now has an introduction by Lemony Snickett) and what has to be one of the first graphic novels as we know them, called "Poem Strip," a retelling of the Orpheus/Eurydice story. I've bought both of these and am eager to get started. Here are a couple of amazing frames from "Poem Strip."

Book 10: Il Giorno della Civetta (The Day of the Owl, 1961)

Apparently people used to seriously deny the existence of the Mafia — even in the heart of Sicily. Either it wasn't actually real, as many absurdly maintained, or its reality was so entombed in silence (the notorious omerta) that it may as well have been sheer myth.

That was before mobsters had become an ethnic cliche and organized-crime an entertainment franchise.

Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia's "The Day of the Owl" appeared during the reign of silence — and apparently played a significant role in shattering it. It's an impressive example of how a skillful, poignant piece of fiction can give people the courage to face reality.

"Is it really possible," one of Sciascia's characters wonders, "to conceive of the existence of a criminal association so vast, so well-organized, so secret and so powerful that it can dominate not only half of Sicily, but the entire United States of America?"

The questioner's tone is mocking and scornful, but the question is the driving force of the novel, or rather, the novel itself becomes the answer: Yes, it is possible to conceive of such a thing.

The story is simple: A man running through a crowded square gets shot to death, and everyone pretends nothing happened. No one knows anything. No one saw anything. It's as though the collective denial of a fact can simply erase the fact. Except one man doesn't see it that way. Maybe because he's new to Sicily and doesn't know any better. Or maybe because he's a man of principle who takes his job as a police officer seriously. As the novel progresses, we realize it's a little of both.

The man in question, a Captain Bellodi, is from mainland Italy. "Mainlanders," we are told, "are decent enough but just don't understand things." And not only is he from the mainland, but he's from Parma, the northern part of the mainland. "A polenta eater!" say the spaghetti-eating Sicilians with derision. (Again, we see the pervasive theme of the North-South divide in Italian literature.)

So no one saw anything or knows anything. And even granting that "nothing" happened, there's still a corpse to be explained. The typical explanation for a dead body in Mafia-controlled Sicily is the "crime of passion." If a guy shows up dead, it's obviously because he was sleeping with the wife of some other guy, who decided, quite reasonably in macho Italy, to take revenge. Produce the other guy, slap his wrist, case closed.

But Bellodi has other ideas. He has reason to think the man was murdered not in the heat of passion but because the man, an honest and skilled contractor, refused to pay protection money to the local mob. And Bellodi is right. The rest of the novel is his unraveling of the shooting and his demonstration of how the vast crime network goes all the way to the top of the government. Not only that. But that the network, the crime "family," is the very structure of Sicilian society. "The only institution in the Sicilian conscience that really counts is the family; counts, that is to say, more as a juridical contract or bond than as a natural association based on affection. The family is the Sicilian's State."

The Mafia is family, a "secret society for mutual aid," seen as the only source of justice. If you are good to it, it will be good to you. People who depend on the government or police for help are seen as betraying the family to "corrupt" outsiders. This, along with the notion of "paying for protection," is an idea we see in later works about the Mafia, most notably in the opening scene of Mario Puzo's "The Godfather," in which Don Corleone, with his deep sense of justice, is shown like a king of old listening to the grievances of his serfs. The guy who chooses to deal with the police instead of with the family doesn't fare well.

I actually read Puzo's book before reading Sciascia's. It's gripping and entertaining until the last third, which weirdly drops down the rungs from mass-market fun to out-and-out drivel. The drivel is happily absent from the famous film that shaped so much of our cultural awareness of the Mafia. And drivel is nowhere to be seen in Sciascia's slim 120-page literary volume. But Puzo's 500-page tome has a clear debt to Sciascia's, not just in the big ideas, but in some small details as well — for example, the lupara guns that are used in both books, the emphasis on street smarts vs. formal education, and the "pure-hearted" Mafia don in "The Day of the Owl" who quirkily drinks a strong double espresso every half hour. Sciascia's don has his coffee; Puzo's has his garden and his gentle manners. And every Mafia don since then, up to Tony Soprano, has been an identifiable mix of ruthless, quirky and lovable.

Ultimately, Sciascia's Captain Bellodi is thwarted. One of the key participants turns out to have a phony, yet ironclad, alibi — paid for by the mob, of course — and Bellodi ends up leaving Sicily for a while. By novel's end, though, he misses the sunny rawness of the island and knows he will return to it. It's not clear, though, whether he is returning to fight or to peacefully admit defeat.

The title comes from Shakespeare's "Henry VI, Part III."

And he that will not fight for such a hope
Go home to bed, and like the owl by day
If he arise, be mocked and wondered at.

Is Bellodi the owl who flies by day? And is such an owl a laudable exception, or just a freak of nature?

Book 9: La Luna e i Falò (The Moon and the Bonfires, 1950)

"One needs a town, if only for knowing the pleasures of leaving it."

Cesare Pavese is regarded as one of Italy's pre-eminent writers, not just for his novels and poetry, but also for his translations of American authors into Italian, most notably Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Apparently he never actually set foot in America, a source of utter amazement to me after reading "The Moon and the Bonfires," which contains so many piquant descriptions of life in the States, particularly of California and its "cities sparkling along the coast." The last coast, he calls it, the end of the world.

The novel is about a desperately poor Italian boy, a bastard left at a foundling hospital, who goes to America as a young man. "In America, the beauty of it is, they're all bastards." He makes a fortune there — it's not quite clear how, although bathtub gin is mentioned — and returns in the late 1940s to his rural village in northern Italy. Everything has changed. Even his beloved hazel trees are gone. Mere, and mostly sad, reminders of what used to be are all that remain. The narrator — referred to only as the "eel" or "the American" — has the classic "you can't go home again" realization. "Could I make anyone understand that what I wanted was only to see something I'd seen before? To see carts, to see haylofts, to see a wine tub, an iron fence, a chicory flower, a checked blue handkerchief, a drinking gourd, the handle of a hoe?"

As the novel progresses, it's not clear how much change is from World War II (and Italy being on the wrong side) and how much is a product of the narrator's altered perspective from aging and living abroad.

The change from the war is considerable, almost overwhelming. The narrator observes: "The first thing I said when I got off the boat at Genoa among houses smashed by the war was that every house, every courtyard, every terrace had meant something to someone, and that even more than physical ruin and the dead, you hate to think of so many years of living, so many memories wiped out out like that in one night without leaving a sign."

But then he continues with a sense, born of his time abroad, that such devastation is not determinative: "Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's better that way, better for everything to go up in a bonfire of dry grass and for people to begin again. That's how it was in America — when you were sick of something, a job or a place, you changed it. Over there even whole towns, with taverns, city halls and stores, are as empty now as graveyards."

The landscape, the familiar physical world ("a well-hoed, well-tended vineyard, with the right leaves and that smell of the earth baked by an august sun") are important to a feeling of "home," but it's people, the extremely rare ones who can be counted on, who give life its sense of continuity and solidity.

The narrator finds this with his childhood friend Nuto, now a grown man but with the same heart and charm as when he was a kid.

The narrator had learned a love of knowledge and the value of curiosity from Nuto, who had advised "You'll always be a good-for-nothing if you don't read books."

And he learned humility and quietness: "Nuto: when he said something he'd end with: 'If I'm wrong, let me know.' That's how I began to understand that you don't just talk to talk, to say 'I did this, I did that, I ate and drank,' but you talk to find an idea, to learn how the world works."

It's so simple, but the narrator's description of what it's like to have a best friend is still the best I've ever read: "Just listening to these talks and being Nuto's friend, knowing him so well, was like drinking wine and hearing music played."

*************

This was Cesare Pavese's last book. I've read that he was in love with the American actress Constance Dowling, at left, with whom he had an affair while she was working in Italy after the war. Her ending the relationship is said to have been the reason for his fatal overdose of sleeping pills in 1950. One of his last poems, eerily, was titled "Death Will Come and Look at Me with Your Eyes."

Less eerie, but crazy beautiful, and relevant to this last novel as a meditation on home and belonging is his poem "Nocturne":

Nocturne

The hill is like night against the clear sky.
Your head framed against it, barely moving,
and moving with the sky. You are like a cloud
seen between branches. In your eyes the laughter
and strangeness of a sky that is not yours.

The hill of earth and leaves halts
your bright gaze with its dark mass,
your mouth has the curve of a gentle hollow
between distant slopes. You seem to play
with the great hill and the clearness of the sky:
to please me you echo the ancient background
and make it purer.

But you live elsewhere.
Your gentle blood came from elsewhere.
The words you say have no meeting-point
with the rugged sadness of this sky.
You are only a white and sweetly gentle cloud
entangled one night among ancient branches.

Book 8: Le Avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1881-83)

"Pinocchio," it turns out, is a fairly big and complex book — not the kid-sized read I thought I could breeze through in half an hour. It's also darker and more surreal than I had imagined. The fairy who watches over Pinocchio, for example, has blue hair and may or may not be dead. She's the "Blue-haired Fairy." In the Disney movie, the "Blue Fairy" is simply a good-lookin' blonde in a blue dress. Go figure. In the movie, Jiminy Cricket plays a prominent role, not only as the narrator but as the conscience of Pinocchio throughout. In the book, Pinocchio murders the interfering cricket immediately because he wants him to shut the hell up.

Pinocchio is a little shit. I don't mean he's merely ornery either. I mean he's a total selfish bastard, whom you don't even feel sorry for when he sleeps too close to the fire and burns his wooden feet off, rendering him immobile. The original drawing of him by Enrico Mazzanti, at left, is far more suggestive of his knavery than Walt Disney's cuddly depiction. Why does Geppetto bother to make this ingrate a new pair of feet? Can't he see Pinocchio will use them not to walk to school like a good little boy but to wreak more havoc? It's textbook codependency.

It's a shame we can't read an original source with our minds absolutely clear of the subsequent, more wildly popular, incarnations. One becomes unduly focused on comparisons — Why was this element left out? Why was that added? Why is this character so different? Why, to provide a specific example, is this profoundly Tuscan setting given an almost Swiss feel in the movie? — instead of just appreciating the original text, which in the case of "Pinocchio" is a truly bizarre and garish dreamscape, rife with sadism and fear, fantastic characters and absurd situations, not the least of which is a puppet who cannot be controlled, even by his own creator.

Carlo Collodi, a journalist from Florence, wrote "Le Avventure di Pinocchio" in the early 1880s as a serialized fairy tale in Italy's first newspaper for children. It was a morality tale about how people — not just children — should behave. They should work for their money rather than expecting handouts or miracles. They should not be the pawns of the rich, nor the dupes of the greedy. They should take care of their relatives. They should be grateful for the good things in life. They should value education. They should be generous. In the original serialized version, Pinocchio is unable to mend his ways and is actually hanged for his failures. There's some nice kid lit for you.

Collodi's editors got him to revisit this outcome, and he ended up adding several chapters, giving us the beloved ending of the wooden puppet whose eventual goodness turns him into a real boy. And presumably he grows up, unlike the Anglo boy par excellence Peter Pan, to be a real man, whose nose — can we assume? — stays the same length whether or not he tells lies.

Apparently the story of Pinocchio did not become an astronomical best-seller until it was translated into English a decade later. Thus Collodi, like many a writer, died never knowing that his creation became one of the most recognized fictional characters in the world. When the movie came out in 1940 — it was only Disney's second full-length feature; the first was "Snow White" — Pinocchio became a household word, and "When You Wish Upon a Star," from its soundtrack, a madly popular tune.

The movie has its own charms — Geppetto's fantastic cat Figaro, for one, who does not appear in the novel — and it does pay homage to Collodi by using the framing device of his book. Jiminy Cricket is seen opening the lavish, heavy tome titled "Pinocchio" to begin his tale, signaling to the audience that the source material is something venerable and antique, i.e., a piece of writing.

My favorite thing from the book may be the "phlegmatic snail." (Do words like "phlegmatic" even appear in children's literature these days? I hope so). The snail is like a lady-in-waiting to the Blue-haired Fairy. Pinocchio shouts up to the fourth-story window where she's sitting. He needs help immediately. She says sure, she'll be right down. Nine hours later she opens the door — vividly illustrating a "snail's pace" and giving Pinocchio a lesson in industry and patience.

Note: When I was looking up information about Collodi, I came across a really interesting article in the New York Review of Books about how Collodi's "Pinocchio" helped shape a national identity after the Italian city states in the mid-19th century unified into the country now known as Italy. "Pinocchio" illustrated something all the diverse regions had in common and could thus rally around: an "irreverent and skeptical pessimism."

Book 7: Una Donna (A Woman, 1906)

This novel by Sibilla Aleramo is a feminist classic in continental Europe but is not widely known here. Published in 1906, it precedes Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," the feminist touchstone in English, by more than two decades.

Aleramo is not the writer that Woolf is (but who is?). Her book occasionally gets mired in sentimental rambling that you'd never see in Woolf, but it also teems with insights and observations about women's experience that still — a hundred years later — sharply resonate.

The plot of her novel is simple and, when you discover it is autobiographical, shocking. The main character is, as the teenaged Aleramo was, raped by a man and compelled to marry him. Apparently the practice of "seducing," i.e., sexually assaulting, girls was common at that time in rural Italy as a way of procuring a bride. After the act, the girl is "ruined" and must look to her rapist and the "legitimization" of marriage as the only entry back into society.

Because the culture is so deeply misogynistic, the full horror of this union is not immediately apparent to the girl. She even determines to love the man, partially to make a virtue of necessity, but also because her mind simply can't abandon her youthful ideals and hopes. Growing up in an educated, liberal household — before her father accepted a job in the Marche, a rural region of Italy — she had not felt the constraints of her gender. "I had never acknowledged that being a woman might affect my future." She had imagined freedom, deep love for a soulmate and satisfying work as the rewards of adulthood.

She thinks these things are still in her reach after the marriage, despite all the contrary signs. "I wanted to believe in my happiness, present and future. I wanted love to be a grand and beautiful experience. I was sixteen and wanted a love which would incorporate all the mysterious poetry of life."

But wishing can't make this so. Her husband has other ideas. The incalculable selfishness that allowed him to rape her — and the society that nodded its approval — allows him to continue on a course wherein she is little more than a domestic servant, existing to satisfy his various needs. It's a backwater Italian culture where men are never expected to grow up or develop empathy. They go from being fawned-over, egotistical sons to fawned-over, egotistical husbands. A domestic world in which they are not at the center, with all other family members in faithful orbit, is simply inconceivable.

Eventually her determination to love him and make the best of her fate unravels. He has no notion of the tenderness and "color" and love she had longed for as a girl growing up in urban, "magical" Milan. (The differences between the industrial, sophisticated north and the primitive, peasant-filled south are a big theme in Italian literature, I'm finding). He is jealous and intellectually inferior and often offends her "love for rationality." He wins arguments because he is a man and childish, not because he is right. He is terrible at love, treating her body only as a receptacle for his lust. "Was I merely to be used as an object of pleasure, sensually debased in a relentless round of days and nights, until I died?" she grimly asks. "Did this man own me?"

As the questions mount, she realizes the hopelessness of her determination to love him. It's an enterprise dependent on absolute self-neglect. The self-sacrifice and submission touted as the feminine ideal seem more and more like nice words for self-hatred.

When she becomes pregnant, she believes she at last has a reason to live, that a child will supply the missing tenderness and human connection she had longed for. She is right. She loves her son and he loves her. She wants to be an interesting parent for him, an interesting person. She wants to write and travel and enjoy life, as much for his sake as for her own. But this is impossible, she discovers. Her husband legally "owns" his child, just like he owns her, and he has different plans. End of story.

Eventually she musters the strength to leave, to head off to sun-drenched Rome, with its piazzas and fountains and architectural reminders that our histories continually evolve, to become the writer she always wanted to be, to find the "room of one's own," as Woolf would later describe it, but not without horrific and needless tragedy.

Some interesting tidbits about Aleramo after she started her new life: She started it with a vengeance! Like Woolf, she became the most famous feminist in her country and also had a female companion, Lina Poletti, and openly supported homosexual rights. She simultaneously had a relationship with the male writer Giovanni Cena and said she never felt guilty for loving them both at once. That seems remarkably frank for 1900! She was quite attractive to young literary types and, according to the Introduction of my book, "for two generations of young Italian writers, an affair with Sibilla Aleramo was worth, in terms of publicity and reputation, at least a major literary prize." I love that.

Book 6: La Solitudine dei Numeri Primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers, 2008)

This book by Paolo Giordano was an international best-seller and also garnered critical acclaim, including Italy's Strega Prize in 2008.

I don't quite see why.

On the one hand, it's a very accessible read, it has a catchy title and a hip-looking author, who also, intriguingly, happens to be a physicist, and it's a decent, intelligent story about a pair of misfits.

Key word: story. Not novel.

I simply can't think of a reason why this tale needed almost 300 pages to be told. It's such a simple premise. Two kids have horribly traumatic things happen: One, the boy, Mattia, is responsible for the death of his developmentally disabled sister; the other, the girl, Alice, is partially paralyzed in a skiing accident. They grow up to be social misfits with some pretty awful coping behaviors; the boy cuts himself to ribbons, the girl won't eat. They meet as teenagers and develop a deep, abstract bond, but never physically get together beyond a poignantly described kiss (“All Mattia saw was a shadow moving toward him. He instinctively closed his eyes and then felt Alice’s hot mouth on his, her tears on his cheek, or maybe they weren’t hers, and finally her hands, so light, holding his head still and catching all his thoughts and imprisoning them there, in the space that no longer existed between them.”).

They are like — cue the title! — prime numbers. Divisible only by themselves and one. There are some prime numbers that almost touch — 17 and 19, 41 and 43 — but are separated by an even number. As the count increases, these "twin primes" become rarer. OK. Is this heavy-handed symbolism by a writer who's also a math geek? Or a truly compelling conceit? In a short story, I think it would be a compelling conceit, a concentrated image. In a novel, it becomes overbearing and belabored.

Some of my dislike might be purely personal. I just didn't relate to the two main characters. Maybe the prime-number metaphor, rather than elucidating their experiences, ironically reinforces their mysteries.

The book is also deliberately vague. It doesn't specify what part of Italy it's set in. A "city" is mentioned. The "Alps" are mentioned. One character drives an Italian Lancia. Mattia goes to live in a northern country that you vaguely understand to be somewhere in Scandinavia, but you never know for sure. Why? Some writers seem to think this lack of detail lends their work an air of universality. I think it lends an air of imprecision.

Book 5: L'isola di Arturo (Arturo's Island, 1957)

This beloved novel from the late '50s strikes me as an Italian "Wuthering Heights." Written by a woman, Elsa Morante, it shares some of the dark, brooding, romantic qualities of Emily Bronte and also some of her plot devices: a lonely, sensitive boy who's essentially an orphan (Arturo is dark and bold and intense like the "gypsy" Heathcliff; Arturo's absentee father even calls him "Blacky"); a faith in a singular "forbidden" love as redemption (not so much a Cathy figure here, a "sister," but something close, a stepmother — both the wives of other men); a brutish, cruel male head of household; and that gloomy, romantic feeling of being physically and spiritually trapped by a rugged, isolated landscape that you alternately love and resent (here the rocky island of Procida, as remote as Bronte's English moors to a boy who has no means of escape).

It's also a coming of age story. Arturo's mother dies giving birth to him, and he is raised on goat's milk by a teenaged boy who is the servant of Arturo's father, a restless German who came to the island in his youth and who visits his son only sporadically. Arturo worships his absentee father.

"If I'd been an artist and had had epic poems, history books and so on to illustrate, I think I'd have put my father in as hero a thousand times over; and I'd have had to melt down gold dust in my paintbox, to color his hair."

Eventually, the hero-father brings a barely literate young Italian girl to live on the island as his bride. He is cruel and mocking and negligent. After a brief, disturbing honeymoon — during which she becomes pregnant — he abandons her and Arturo for his mysterious travels. Arturo at first resents his stepmother, Nunziatella (she makes fresh pasta for him every day!), who is only a couple of years his senior, but gradually he falls desperately in love with her — although, having had no role model for expressing tenderness, his feelings come out all wrong. And, in any case, Nunziatella, does not return his affection, feeling duty-bound to her worthless husband. The unrequited love is the beginning of disillusionment, of growing up, of the realization that loving someone entitles you to exactly zilch. It's the beginning of realizing that one's father is only human, and, in Arturo's case — gasp! —hopelessly in love, unrequited love, with another man (explaining all those mysterious travels).

Motherless Arturo's intense worship of his father, followed by intense disillusionment, then pity, reminded me a lot of the father-son relationship in "As God Commands" (the third book I read). I think that relationship is a theme in literature in general — breaking away from the father — but perhaps the element of machismo in Italian culture gives it extra punch.


In the end, Arturo's teenaged-caretaker (he of the goat's milk) returns to Procida and he and Arturo, raised also on adventure stories (the Excellent Condottieri!), leave together to fight in World War II. He knows that Italy is on the wrong side, but like most young men with a broken heart and a lust for life he doesn't care much about "the rights and wrongs of the business."

As in "Wuthering Heights," there's little sense of the outside world in this book. Sparse mentions of the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, the gangster Al Capone, the actor Clark Gable and "space men," as well as the mention of World War II at the end, anchor the story to a point in time, but it's really timeless in essence. This island and this boy and this conflict exist in any and every century.

I love Elsa Morante's writing style. It's lush and evocative. She makes you remember the hot sun on the rocks, the craggy carob tree languishing in Arturo's courtyard, the sirocco blowing north from the Sahara, across the blue Mediterranean, enlivening the island with a dry, dreamy wind. At times the story feels a little overdone and bogged down in internal monologue, but maybe that's necessary — for authenticity! — when writing about a teenager. What the wonderful Micol says in "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" is true here: "There is no situation, however sad or boring that doesn't, basically, have some compensation, often substantial."

Interesting notes: Morante, a famous novelist in her own right, was married to the even more famous Italian writer Alberto Moravia, author of "The Conformist" and other books. She was part Jewish, like him, and the two of them were forced to go into hiding during the early 1940s to escape Fascist persecution. I love this picture of them at the seaside in Capri.

Procida, Arturo's island, is a real island in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the coast of Naples. I was happy to learn this — and also that two good films, both redolent of Italy and Mediterranean architecture, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Il Postino," were shot there.

Book 4: Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1962)

This short, haunting novel by Giorgio Bassani takes place just before World War II in Ferrara, Italy, a northern city noted for its Renaissance palaces. The narrator, Giorgio, is a middle-class Jew who befriends the aristocratic Finzi-Contini children, Alberto and Micol, also Jewish, who live in a splendid walled estate with an enormous garden — a garden so old that one of the plane trees is said to have been planted 500 years ago by Lucrezia Borgia.

After Italy adopts the Manifesto della razza (the race code) in 1938, Jews are stripped of their Italian citizenship and are banned from many jobs and facets of public life. They can't marry gentiles. They can't employ them as servants — "real" Italians having been declared members of the Aryan race and thus superior. Jews can't use the public library or even the town's athletic club.

In response, the Finzi-Continis open up their fabled garden as a place for young people to gather and play tennis. Here they lounge about in chic white tennis outfits — captured so elegantly in the film (at right) — and sip Skiwasser* and talk about their studies. Micol, charmingly, is writing a thesis on Emily Dickinson. The young men smoke pipes (the reason I chose the above photo of Bassani, who himself grew up Jewish in Ferrara and met his wife playing tennis).

Here in the garden Giorgio and Micol scamper away from the group with the Great Dane Jor. Micol loves the huge garden with all its dappled sunlight and ancient trees. When Giorgio can't identify a single tree she looks at him like he's a "monster." "How can you possibly be so ignorant?" The moment reveals not only the sauciness that endears her to Giorgio, but also the hallmark of the Finzi-Continis: Wealth is not wasted on them. Their treasures — their house, their library, their recordings of American jazz, their acreage — are not empty status symbols, but are known and loved and appreciated. Even the old carriage, long supplanted by an automobile, is trotted out regularly for spins up and down the driveway. Why should beautiful things languish and die?

In the garden, Giorgio falls deeply in love with Micol, who, deeming him more like a brother — Oh dreaded fate! — rejects his advances. He spends the rest of the novel desperately pining for her, and the heartbreak unravels him, just as Europe is disintegrating into World War II.

In the prologue of the book (prologues are ubiquitous in Italian literature, I'm finding), we are briefly told that Micol and her family were deported to Germany and died there in concentration camps. In the epilogue, we are brought full circle and reminded of this fate. By then Micol is not just Micol, a pretty girl loved madly by a boy. Rather, she is the very luster of European civilization laid to waste by brutish, glowering ignorance.

The power of this ending is enhanced by an almost complete lack of detail — a necessary omission because our narrator Giorgio, like so many Jewish survivors, simply doesn't know what happened to his friends. ("all deported to Germany in '43, who could say if they found any sort of burial at all?") He knows nothing of the horrors that met them at the concentration camp, the horrors so readily depicted in more recent Holocaust narratives. He just knows that they vanished. And never returned.

Director Vittorio de Sica's treatment of this ending is possibly the most moving thing I have ever seen in a film. Like the book, he doesn't rely on any grim Holocaust imagery, even though he could, not being constrained by a first-person narrator. Instead, he shows the gorgeous Renaissance palaces of Ferrara and then — stunningly — the young people playing tennis in the sunny garden of the Finzi-Continis, not a care in the world, with the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, being sung in the background. The credits roll on an empty tennis court in an empty garden.

—————

Some odds and ends:

Giorgio Bassani, interestingly, was responsible for the publication of "The Leopard," the first book I discussed, after it was rejected by several publishers. How fitting for him to have recognized its worth.

The actress who plays Micol in the Vittorio de Sica film — Dominique Sanda (shown above with the bicycle) — is the dancing lesbian in Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Conformist"! And she's actually French, not Italian.

The character Alberto Finzi-Contini, Micol's brother, seems gay in the book and in the movie, but nothing is ever directly said about it, except that he takes no interest in brothels and seems to prefer the company of young men and likes "modern" furniture. The book has an unrelated passage about homosexuality that shows the narrator Girogio's progressive sympathies: "Malnate, on this subject, had very simple ideas: like a true goy — I thought to myself. For him, homosexuals were only 'poor bastards,' 'obsessed' creatures, not worth considering ... I, on the contrary, sustained that love justifies and sanctifies everything, even homosexuality." This seems ahead of its time, but the dots are never connected. I read, though, that Bassani wrote an earlier novel, in the 1950s, "exploring the marginalization of Jews and homosexuals."

*Skiwasser is an Austrian drink of equal parts water and raspberry syrup with a slice of lemon added and a few grapes. It's consumed hot. In summer, cold, without the lemon, it's called Himbeerwasser.

Ferrara is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site for its Renaissance architecture. Here's the Corso Ercole I d'Este, the street in the town center on which the fictional Finzi-Continis live.

Book 3: Come Dio Comanda (As God Commands, 2006)

This book is crazy good. By Niccolo Ammaniti, it won the Strega Prize in 2007.

It's been described as a gritty crime novel — and grit and crime certainly abound — but there's so much more: tender, refined character studies, brilliant plotting, beautiful language, sharp satire and superb moments of comedy (imagine two Italian kids trying to decipher the meaning of Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." What does "nokkin" mean? one asks. Hmmm. Hard to say).

The book centers on 13-year-old Cristiano, who lives with his alcoholic father, Rino, in a dilapidated industrial town in Italy. The father has two close friends: a fellow Grappa-swilling alcoholic named Danilo and a mentally challenged boy-man named Quattro Formagggi (after his favorite pizza). These people make up Cristiano's family and, really, his whole world, aside from an ineffective and self-involved, but ultimately sympathetic, social worker.

[Alcohol note: Grappa, which I've heard of but never tasted, is an Italian brandy distilled from the pressed grapes left over from wine-making. Cynar, which I've never heard of and which intoxicates a desperate Danilo in the book — when he runs out of Grappa! — is an Italian liqueur made mostly from artichokes. Yes, artichokes. Wikipedia says the Swiss especially like to mix it with orange juice. (Uh, really? Can that be good?)]

Ammaniti's characters are pathetic, hard-bitten, poorly educated, macho, racist. They think immigrants are stealing all the jobs and all the Italian women. They effusively praise Cristiano's school essay that calls for a "new Hitler" to drive all the foreigners out of Italy. They admire the sleazy Silvio Berlusconi, that self-made industrialist from the North who became the richest man in Italy and prime minister (despite the "commie" judges working incessantly against him).

The crime they concoct to get rich is staggeringly idiotic. At some level they seem to realize this, but their lives are so empty and formless that the direction provided by even a terrible idea is something to cling to, something to fill the days.


And yet, for all their dreadfulness, you feel for them, you want to know what happens, you even root for them a little, maybe because their rage feels so impotent and isolated and pathetic — and even false. It's not so much a belief system to act upon as, again, something to cling to, something to fill the days. And something to keep painful self-awareness at bay. It certainly bears little resemblance to the organized, well-oiled brutality of the Mussolini era seen in "The Conformist" or in my most recent read, Giorgio Bassani's "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis."

"As God Commands" has also been made into a film. Two other novels of Ammaniti have been translated into English: "I'm Not Scared" and "Steal You Away." I hope to read them both, though not, for diversity's sake, as part of this project.

Book 2: Il Conformista (The Conformist, 1951)

This is a novel by Alberto Moravia, one of Italy's most acclaimed writers (judging by the number of prizes and mentions of his name).

Set in Rome during the Mussolini era, it's the story of a man desperate to conform to what he considers the "normal" world — in this case, Fascist Italy. He works in one of Mussolini's ministries. He marries a normal woman. He buys a normal house. He relentlessly pursues the normal, only to learn that normal is a thin facade hiding a mountain of "abnormal." No one is normal; everyone is pretending. Conforming.

The book is described as anti-Fascist — Moravia, half Jewish, had to go into hiding during the Mussolini years — but it doesn't feel peculiar to that era or those politics to me. Il Duce is mentioned a few times and there's a significant air raid at the end (one of two big surprises in the book), but it's really a psychological drama that one can imagine being played out in a variety of settings.

Moravia is apparently noted for writing frankly about sexuality, and the sexuality in "The Conformist" is certainly interesting. I suppose it's fairly graphic by 1950s standards, though nothing in it would make a modern reader bat an eyelash. In fact, the saga of a defrocked priest — shot by the lead character, Marcello, during a molestation attempt — is uncannily familiar (80 years after it occurs in the book).

A bizarre take on lesbianism — but maybe ahead of its time — occurs on Marcello's honeymoon in Paris, where a woman he's aggressively trying to seduce is even more aggressively trying to seduce his wife. This involves a scene at a Parisian nightclub where the all-female staff sports men's suits and monocles. The movie poster for the 1970 Bernardo Bertolucci film based on the book really markets this scene — and plays up the sexiness rather than, as the book does, the strange sadness.

Something else that stood out to me with this book is its exploration, through the incident of the defrocked priest, of how a person's interpretation of an event from childhood can influence the person's whole life — how our understanding and emotions as children are so profoundly different from what we experience in adulthood and how memory is seldom a reliable bridge between those two worlds. And how guilt can fester where guilt shouldn't have existed at all. But that's the book's second big surprise!

Book 1: Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958)

"The Leopard" is considered one of the greatest Italian novels of the 20th century, or maybe, to hear people talk, of all time. The fact that I had never heard of it is the main reason I'm on this reading adventure: shame, basically.

And needing to know what all the fuss is about.

Another reason is booze. What brought me to the Wikipedia page of the author of "The Leopard" is one of those online serendipities where one interesting link leads to an even more interesting link to another and so on, until the object of your original search is all but forgotten. In this case, I was reading about cocktails and saw a reference to Strega, an Italian liqueur made with saffron. So I clicked on that and saw that Strega is also the name of the Italian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. So I clicked on that and saw a reference to one of the winners of the Strega Prize: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, a Sicilian prince and author of a single book, "The Leopard."

A prince. A solitary book. If that weren't sufficiently romantic, said book, I learned, was rejected as "unpublishable" during the prince's lifetime but was (with tragic predictability) published after his death and became the best-selling novel in Italian history.

I ordered it.

I still haven't found Strega the liqueur.

But I've now read "The Leopard." My favorite thing about it is that it's a novel written in the 1950s about events in the mid-19th century, but it doesn't feel forced and anachronistic as so many historical novels do where the narrative voice simply doesn't match the time period. This voice feels authentic, like the author himself had lived through the 1860s rather than just imagined them. Perhaps that's because the main character, Don Fabrizio Corbera, is himself a Sicilian prince like the author.

The book takes place during the unification of Italy, known as the Risorgimento, when the various Papal States were united to form the single modern nation. The revolution spells the end of the rigid class system, but it also gives rise to the crass greed and vulgarity of the new capitalists who assume power.

My favorite scene is when Don Fabrizio, resigning himself to the new world order, has some members of the merchant class to lunch. He deliberately dresses down — a gracious gesture meant to spare his "inferiors," not used to dining with nobility, the embarrassment of not having the right clothes. Alas, the most annoying of these merchants, "rising" to his new station in life, dons a gaudy, ill-fitting suit of tails, effectively outdressing, but not outclassing, his host. It's the perfect metaphor for New Money and the failure to understand that the essential quality of Aristocracy, the one worth pursuing, is graciousness, not wealth.

My second favorite scene is when Don Fabrizio is hunting — lazily picnicking, really! — with his servant in a grove of cork trees (cork trees! for which Sicily is rather famous, apparently), and the conversation they have, man to man, reveals so much about their new destinies and regrets. The servant is fearful of the new democracy, so prone to abuse, and the power-hungry new capitalists. And that's a place where one realizes this novel, far from being an apology for aristocratic rule, is being written just after the horrors of Mussolini.

Another place where one is sucked into the modern era, this time overtly, is when the aging Don Fabrizio is wandering through an ancient, beautiful palace. The narrator writes:

"From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943."

It's an amazing tonal shift in the book. And startling. I read that the author began writing "The Leopard" as a way to deal with his depression after the Allies bombed and looted his own family estate. It's like he couldn't help but observe, in his 19th century tale, as an aside, or maybe even as the main point, that the future, if you only knew, is not to be imagined.

Also of interest, "The Leopard" was turned into a Burt Lancaster movie in 1963. Should be entertaining. Burt Lancaster doesn't come immediately to mind as the Italian aristocrat and amateur astronomer Don Fabrizio, but I'll give it a try.

And here's an interesting slideshow I found on the New York Times website called "Lampedusa's Sicily."

And a story called "Sicily Through the Eyes of the Leopard."