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."