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."