This is a remarkable and profoundly sad book. It is set in Italy during Word War II and focuses on the struggles of ordinary people to survive among the rubble, violence and poverty.
Ida Mancuso is half-Jewish and lives in Rome. As the Axis powers become aware that they are losing the war, so the violence against their racial enemies accelerates. In one remarkable scene, Ida runs through the now deserted ghetto, drawn there as we feel compelled to touch a plate we have been told is hot, and ends up at the railway station, just as the final train is being dispatched to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and as the train leaves, one of the deportees hands her a fragment of a note to his family which she carries around with her wherever she goes thereafter.
Morante is an interesting figure. She was married to the novelist Alberto Moravia, and with him she spent the war in hiding from the Fascist regime. History is her most famous work, which was hailed as ‘the novel of the century’. While this is way wide of the mark, it’s nonetheless a wonderful book.
In many ways, it’s a lament for the way that the left failed the working classes both before and after the war. There is tremendous bitterness in Morante’s summaries of events in the war that precede each section of the novel, each one being devoted to a year. But the most bitterness is reserved for the left’s post-war failure to establish itself as the guardian of ordinary people’s everyday struggles.
In the opening pages of the novel, Ida is raped by a German soldier on his way to North Africa, and as a result she gives birth to a boy, Giuseppe, known throughout the book as Useppe. Useppe is a wonderful, wonderful character, and Morante’s portrait of him is a delightful, wide-eyed pean to childhood. That the childhood is spent in such poverty and desperation only serves to increase the poignancy of Useppe’s good nature.
In the second half of the novel, Useppe acquires a dog, Bella, from his older brother, a Fascist turned partisan turned black-marketeer. The relationship between the boy and the animal is heart-breakingly sympathetic, and is the highlight of the book. Morante steps outside the otherwise completely ralistic framework she has established and allows the dog to speak to Useppe as they trot together through the streets of Rome.
The other key character here is the Dostoevskian Davide Segre, who we initially know as Carlo Vivaldi, an Anarchist Jew who escapes the evacuation to the East and ekes out an existence in the ruins of Rome. He joins the partisans, alongside Useppe’s brother Nino, and in another key scene, brutally kills a German soldier. The dual memory of the Germans’ savagery towards his family, all of whom are killed at Auschwitz, and his own towards the soldier slowly drive Davide mad, a process he accelerates by becoming addicted to opiates and sleeping pills. His only link with the world outside his increasingly incoherent political ramblings is Useppe, who perceives the inner turmoil Davide suffers but is unable to do anything to help him.
There’s really only one thing to complain about with History, and that is the translation by William Weaver, which feels dusty, archaic and rather stilted in many places. Not having access to the original Italian, I can’t say whether or not this is an accurate reflection of Morante’s text, but it certainly feels like there is a filmy layer ever so slightly obscuring the true picture.
History is a profoundly human novel, shot through with anger at the way that political leaders of all types have betrayed the common people. In Ida, Davide and Useppe, Morante gives us three of the most beautifully imagined people, three different victims of the horrific events that surround them. This is an unflinching, sad, and gloweringly powerful book.
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One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.I’m such a sucker for novels about WWII. This looks really interesting!