Much of Italian fiction has been translated into English, but on the whole, Italian writers do not seem to have been able to establish themselves as firmly in the English-speaking world as have those from France, Germany, and Russia. Even the greatest prose classics, such as Alessandro Manzoni’s (1785–1873) The Betrothed (1827, English 1828 and numerous times since), are not widely read, and a prominent author like Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) is best known for his plays while his worthwhile fiction is generally neglected. The range of novels, from the comic self-examination in Italo Svevo’s (1861–1928) Confessions of Zeno (1923, English 1930, and as Zeno’s Conscience, 2001) to Ignazio Silone’s (1900–1978) anti-Fascist political works, Fontamara (1933, English 1934) and Bread and Wine (1937, English 1936), or Cesare Pavese’s (1908–1950) novels, may have led to the impression that Italian literature has little consistency.
Several of the writers born around World War I are those who have long dominated Italian fiction in English translation.
Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000) wrote mainly about Jewish life, especially under the Fascists, and his famous, haunting novel of doomed nobility and unrequited first love,
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962, English 1965, 1977), is representative of his work. Although
Primo Levi (1919–1987) is best known for his nonfiction, his talents extended beyond that. His novel
If Not Now, When? (1982, English 1985, 2015) explores partisan life in World War II, and the enjoyable
The Monkey’s Wrench (published in Great Britain as
The Wrench; 1978, English 1986, 2015) is about a crane rigger who has worked all over the world sharing stories with a Levi-like narrator. The joy with which manual labor is presented here—in a novel in which the characters travel to Moscow—can make it seem downright Soviet, yet Levi’s voices are convincing. While some of Levi’s short stories deal with the Nazi-related subject matter for which his nonfiction is well known, some are very different in style and content.
Alberto Moravia’s (1907–1990) work spanned much of the twentieth century, and he long was one of Italy’s most prominent authors. His often sexually frank novels and their depiction of bourgeois life hold up well, but it is difficult to choose particular highlights in his large œuvre. Even though his characters do not always win readers’ sympathies, Moravia’s use of description and dialogue explain, if not excuse, their actions.
Moravia burst on the scene with The Indifferent Ones (1929, English 1932), employing a plain realism that was unusual for the time and foreshadowed much of his later fiction. Among his notable works are the adolescent tale and treatment of class, Agostino (1944, English 1947, 2014); A Ghost at Noon (now published as Contempt; 1954, English 1955), with its film industry background and marital tension; Two Women (1957, English 1958), a mother–daughter tale set during wartime; and The Lie (1965, English 1966), the diary of a writer frustrated in his attempts to capture the authentic in a work of fiction. Among his more outlandish works is Two: A Phallic Novel (published in Great Britain as The Two of Us; 1971, English 1972), in which the screenwriter, Federico, who has always been in the habit of talking to and arguing with his penis, continues his lively debate with his libidinal alter ego—and finds himself outmatched by his organ.
Natalia Ginzburg’s (1916–1991) assured fiction creates a cumulative effect in which the initial sense of calm and control is eventually displaced by the very human emotions she describes. She is particularly skillful in presenting relationships and the female point of view in the novel
All Our Yesterdays (1952, English 1956, originally
Dead Yesterdays in Great Britain and
A Light for Fools in the United States), set during World War II, as well as the epistolary
No Way (published in Great Britian as
Dear Michael; 1973, English 1974) and
The City and the House (1984, English 1987), in which the letter form accentuates how every character is, in a way, an island.
Gesualdo Bufalino’s (1920–1996) first novel, The Plague-Sower (1981, English 1988), was based on his experiences in a sanatorium where he was treated for tuberculosis at the end of World War II. The novel’s fatalism and intense evocations of memory are found throughout much of his work. Death, and the understanding that it must be confronted as there is no escaping its finality, overshadows almost all of Bufalino’s fiction, yet his novels are not gloomy. An adept writer, Bufalino often surprises with his subtle literary trickery. Night’s Lies (published in the United States as Lies of the Night; 1988, English 1990), a novel in which each of four condemned men tells tales during the night before they are to be executed, is typical of Bufalino’s deceptive narratives.
Many of the great
Italo Calvino’s (1923–1985) works are fables, often fantastical. In
The Baron in the Trees (1957, English 1959), a boy climbs up a tree and spends the rest of his life there, and in
The Cloven Viscount (1952, English 1962), a seventeenth-century viscount’s body is cut in half by a cannonball in battle, with the halves going on to lead separate lives until their actions bring them together again. Much of Calvino’s work moves well into the realm of science fiction, especially the tales around the being called Qfwfq in collections like
Cosmicomics (1965, English 1968), with its very broad humor. Other works are more ethereal, such as
Invisible Cities (1972, English 1974), a collection of short, evocative pieces in which Marco Polo reports to Kublai Khan from cities in his vast empire. Though hardly typical of his work, it may be his most representative fiction. Calvino was also a member of the Oulipo, which influenced much of his literary experimentation, most obviously and most enjoyably in
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979, English 1981), a self-referential work of fiction full of misdirection and several genre parodies, with the reader an active participant in the unfolding experiences.
Just as Calvino’s works transcend fantasy, Leonardo Sciascia’s (1921–1989) are far more than simple mysteries. Sciascia’s native Sicily was the setting for most of his books, which often took on the Mafia, as well as local political failures. An exception is his novel The Council of Egypt (1963, English 1966), one of his best works, set in the time of the French Revolution and dealing with history and falsification.
The early works of
Antonio Tabucchi (1943–2012) are quasi mysteries, in which the author plays games with the reader, rarely ending with a clear resolution. Tabucchi’s interest is more philosophical than the practical whodunit (or who is it, as identity is always a central issue in his fiction). In
Indian Nocturne (1984, English 1988), for example, a character travels to India looking for a missing friend, but the foreign and exotic locale dominates the short narrative. In
The Edge of the Horizon (1986, English 1990), a morgue attendant is obsessed with learning the identity of a corpse, a “Carlo Nobodi.”
KEEP IN MIND
• One hundred very short and playfully metaphysical “novels” are collected in Giorgio Manganelli’s (1922–1990) Centuria (1979, English 2005).
• Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s (1896–1957) The Leopard (1958, English 1960) is a tale of late-nineteenth-century Sicily that became an international best seller and enjoys continued popularity.
• Despite the wordplay that is necessarily lost in translation, the mayhem of language and communication in Carlo Emilio Gadda’s (1893–1973) impressive fiction, That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (1957, English 1965), makes for a novel that is more than a mere murder mystery.
• Dino Buzzati’s (1906–1972) The Tartar Steppe (1940, English 1952) is a classic about how life can simply pass by.
• Tommaso Landolfi (1908–1979) wrote creative and often gothic short stories.
• Luigi Malerba’s (1927–2008) fascinating, reality-questioning narratives are The Serpent (1965, English 1968) and What Is This Buzzing, Do You Hear It Too? (1968, English 1969).
Many of Tabucchi’s books are set in Portugal, and he clearly feels a close affinity to that country’s language and literature. Indeed, one of his finest novels is Requiem: A Hallucination (1991, English 1994), which he wrote in Portuguese (and which was translated into Italian by another writer). An homage to Portugal and especially Lisbon, as well as to the wonderful Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), whose life and writing inform much of Tabucchi’s work, Requiem is an appealing “hallucination” (as the subtitle has it). Pereira Declares (published in Great Britain first as Declares Pereira and now as Pereira Maintains; 1994, English 1995) also is set in Portugal, just before World War II but is a more realist work, with Tabucchi subtitling it A True Account (or, in the American edition, A Testimony). Pereira, the lead character, is in charge of a newspaper’s cultural page but finds politics inescapable in Fascist Portugal. Tabucchi draws a sympathetic portrait of a man who is set in his ways and enjoys certain simple pleasures but ultimately finds himself morally obligated to take a stand. The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro (1997, English 1999), which takes place in contemporary Portugal, is about a journalist covering a sensational murder case, and while hardly a mystery thriller, its examination of media manipulation and conflicting interests, as well as a protagonist who would rather be writing a study of Elio Vittorini, produces an unusual but enjoyable read.
In novels such as Inferences from a Sabre (1984, English 1990) and A Different Sea (1991, English 1993), Claudio Magris (b. 1939) explores twentieth-century history, basing his stories and characters on historical facts and figures. His most ambitious work, Blindly (2005, English 2010), is presented in an almost musical counterpoint by an institutionalized man who appropriates the voices of other historical figures for his narrative. The layers of history in this novel range from a Danish seaman who travels from the frontiers of Australia to Iceland in the nineteenth century to the narrator’s own experiences in Josip Tito’s infamous Goli Otok gulag in Yugoslavia after World War II.
Umberto Eco’s (b. 1932) medieval thriller,
The Name of the Rose (1980, English 1983), was an international blockbuster and led to a still continuing parade of imitators. Of all the historical-intellectual mysteries published over the last forty years, few measure up to Eco’s work. With its vivid and accessible presentation of scholarly life in medieval times and the satisfying mystery behind it, as well as Eco’s sense of humor,
The Name of the Rose remains exemplary. Eco has continued to use some of these same elements in his later fiction but has been unable to find a guise to utilize his scholarship as naturally and convincingly as he did in
The Name of the Rose. Of his other works,
Foucault’s Pendulum (1988, English 1989) is the most successful, helped by the mystery and conspiracy in which the ideas are couched.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004, English 2005) has an appealing premise, of an older man who wakes up with a peculiar case of amnesia: all his personal memories have been lost, but he remembers everything he has read. The story of his struggle to find what he has lost provides an interesting consideration of memory, meaning, and identity.
The works of Swiss Italian author
Fleur Jaeggy (b. 1940) and the author writing under the pseudonym
Elena Ferrante can be uncomfortably intense in their brutally honest descriptions of women’s lives. Jaeggy’s
SS Proleterka (2001, English 2003) is a disturbing account of a daughter’s attempt to come to terms with the distant man she knows as her father, while in the more successful
Sweet Days of Discipline (1989, English 1991), the protagonist, largely abandoned by her family, recalls her days at boarding school. Both are very adult novels about being a teenager. Ferrante’s protagonists are mature women who find that they have failed in some way as wives, daughters, or mothers and have not lived up to expectations (especially those of their own mothers). In
The Days of Abandonment (2002, English 2005), a woman has to rebuild her life after her husband suddenly walks out on her and their two children.
The Lost Daughter (2006, English 2008) is about a woman who has established her independence but finds it isolating. Like all of Ferrante’s protagonists, her mother’s expectations and inability to be supportive leave her incapable of being a good mother (or wife) herself, a failure with which she has accepted but still weighs on her. A psychologically astute and devastating quartet of books centered on the lives and relationship of two Neapolitan women, Elena, the narrator, and Lila—
My Brilliant Friend (2011, English 2012),
The Story of a New Name (2012, English 2013),
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013, English 2014), and
The Story of the Lost Child (2014, English 2015)—has received deserved critical and popular acclaim. This vivid and convincing saga of women’s lives is a highpoint of recent European literature.
Among the oddest successes of recent years have been the works of the writing collective that now calls itself
Wu Ming. Writing originally as
Luther Blissett, their
Q (1999, English 2004) is set in the sixteenth century and is a sort of intellectual-philosophical thriller of the Reformation, while
54 (2002, English 2006) has Cary Grant play a secret agent in a global romp.
Manituana (2007, English 2009)—the first volume in a planned eighteenth-century triptych—is largely set in the Mohawk River Valley during the time of the American Revolution. Wu Ming’s ambitiously political works are historical fiction that reflects contemporary conditions. The novels are long and detailed but creative.
KEEP IN MIND
• The determinedly feminist and stylistically varied works of Dacia Maraini (b. 1936) range from the essentially documentary novel Isolina (1985, English 1993), based on a turn-of-the-century murder and trial, to the epistolary Letters to Marina (1981, English 1987).
• Sandro Veronesi’s (b. 1959) The Force of the Past (2000, English 2003) and Quiet Chaos (2005, English 2011) are novels in which the narrators deal with circumstances that lead them to intense introspection.
• Susanna Tamaro’s (b. 1957) tremendously popular Follow Your Heart (1994, English 1995) is an unavoidably sentimental and moving novel of an old woman writing to her granddaughter living in America.
• Alessandro Baricco’s (b. 1958) work extends to his own version of Homer’s epic, An Iliad (2004, English 2006). His simply told tale, Silk (1996, English 1997), about a nineteenth-century silkworm merchant who travels to the then still very exotic Japan, and the charming linked novellas about portraiture, Mr. Gwyn (2011) and Three Times at Dawn (2012), published together in English in a single volume as Mr. Gwyn (2014), are his best work.
• Andrea De Carlo’s (b. 1952) fiction includes the film industry–focused road trip novel, Yucatan (1986, English 1990), and the story of the misadventures of four very urban professionals in the Umbrian countryside, Windshift (2004, English 2006).
• Stefano Benni’s (b. 1947) satirical novels include the science fiction novel Terra! (1983, English 1985) and Margherita Dolce Vita (2005, English 2006), with its depictions of an unusual but endearing family and the ominous outside threats it faces.
Crime Fiction
Beside the work of Leonardo Sciascia, which is rarely found on the mystery shelves, Italian crime fiction has met with little success in the English-speaking world until recently. Even Giorgio Scerbanenco (1911–1969), after whom the leading Italian literary prize awarded for mysteries is named, made no inroads beyond the publication of Duca and the Milan Murders (1966, English 1970, and as Betrayal in Great Britain and Traitors to All in the United States, 2013). This was the second in his series of dark novels set in Milan and featuring Duca Lamberti. The son of a policeman, Lamberti became a doctor but lost his medical license and served a prison term for administering euthanasia. Scerbanenco’s Milan is a contemporary microcosm, a fast-changing world full of moral ambiguities and social inequities, and the Philip Marlowe–like Lamberti, with his deeply ingrained sense of justice, repeatedly finds himself compelled to do what little he can to help those unable to help themselves. With A Private Venus (1966, English 2012), the first installment in the series is now finally also available, as eventually the entire quartet will be.
The writing team of
Carlo Fruttero (1926–2012) and
Franco Lucentini (1920–2002) fared best with American and British readers with their
The D. Case (1989, English 1992), a variation on and resolution of Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but they also have written numerous other mysteries. The first novel on which they collaborated,
The Sunday Woman (1972, English 1973), is a rich and witty portrait of Turin life and a fine example of the mystery genre.
Andrea Camilleri’s (b. 1925) Montalbano books, which started with The Shape of Water (1994, English 2002), remains one of the most satisfying contemporary European mystery series. The books feature an appealingly idiosyncratic protagonist, his name a nod to Spanish author Manuel Vazquez Montalbán, and evoke both the flaws and the beauty of Sicily and Sicilian life (and cooking).
While his autobiographical account of life as The Fugitive (1994, English 2007) remains the most interesting introduction to his work (and the Italian legal system), Massimo Carlotto (b. 1956) also wrote a variety of good but bleak and brutal Italian noirs. Carlo Lucarelli (b. 1960) set much of his crime fiction in the present, but his De Luca books, taking place at the end of World War II, beginning with Carte Blanche (1990, English 2006), are the most successful. The novels are filled with moral ambiguity, and their stark feel and presentation fits the times and subject matter. Gianrico Carofiglio (b. 1961), a judge, has written a series of mysteries, starting with Involuntary Witness (2002, English 2005), that feature the lawyer Guido Guerrieri, who also gets involved in some sleuthing. Although Carofiglio’s mysteries are not true courtroom dramas, legal procedure plays a larger role here than in most crime fiction, revealing the peculiarities of the Italian judicial system. The Past Is a Foreign Country (2004, English 2007), a stand-alone psychological thriller of youthful manipulation, temptation, and seduction, is not nearly as convincing as the less sensationalist Guerrieri books.
Addressing more profound questions about life and morality, Niccolò Ammaniti’s (b. 1966) novels transcend the simple thriller genre. All are hard-edged, and I’m Not Scared (2001, English 2003), presented from the point of view of a nine-year-old, is the most compelling. Later efforts like the more sensational The Crossroads (2006, English 2009) feel too forced.