Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories ed. Jhumpa Lahiri
Translated from the Italian by Various
528 pgs. | hc | 9780241299838 | $30.00

Review by Jeanne Bonner

Novels and memoirs often become labors of love for the authors who birth them. But what about an anthology? How often do we imagine the editor of a large, door-stopper compilation of, say, short stories, calling the arduous task of sorting and selecting the entries a labor of love? And what if the short stories are in a foreign language and the editing also involved commissioning new translations and tracking down old ones?

Author Jhumpa Lahiri, who edited the new Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, doesn’t use those exact words in the anthology’s introduction, but she comes pretty close as she describes what inspired her to want to curate such a collection. It’s of a piece with what inspired her in 2012 (a dozen years after winning the Pulitzer Prize) to move her family to Rome so she could surround herself with the Italian language: “I surrendered to an inexplicable urge to distance myself, to immerse myself and to acquire a second literary formation.” That second literary formation she mentions (it makes me think of “formazione,” which in Italian means training or education) has been fruitful. In addition to publishing two books in Italian, including In Other Words, based on the Italian diary she kept in Rome, Lahiri has translated Domenico Starnone’s novels Ties and Trick, and now the short stories of underappreciated or overlooked authors such as Corrado Alvaro, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Fabrizia Ramondino—all of which appear in the anthology.

It’s not unprecedented for an author to go abroad and lose her head over a language and a country (James Joyce also decamped to Italy, and would converse with his children in Italian; James Baldwin lived for decades in France, as did Mavis Gallant). But how often does such an author—especially one gifted enough to receive this country’s highest literary honor—master the new language enough to write in it or translate important works, as she has done? Indeed, Lahiri’s role as not only a booster of Italian lit, but also a practitioner arguably transformed the process of editing and curating the Penguin anthology (just as, in her diary, she wrote how Rome had transformed her). The result is a primer on short fiction from Italy that, given its thorough and nuanced selections, will likely be used as a college text. Indeed, Lahiri’s inclusion of a side-by-side chronology of Italian literary and historical events—a copy of which may go up on my wall—is peerless in a general interest book of this kind.

With works by 40 writers whose stories were published over the span of 100 years, the anthology appears at a time when so-called #FerranteFever remains high. Indeed, a new novel by Elena Ferrante, the author of the spectacularly successful Neapolitan Series of novels that begins with My Brilliant Friend, has already been published in Italian and will arrive in American bookstores next year, not a moment too soon for fans of the reclusive writer. It can sometimes seem like everyone in America knows Italy—and everyone knows someone who has just returned from Italy, aglow in Mediterranean reminiscing. But beyond Ferrante and a handful of other authors (Dante? Andrea Camilleri?), what does everyone know about Italian literature? Not a whole lot. And perhaps with good reason: translations of books originally published in Italy continue to trail translations of books from France, for example, according to Three Percent’s Translation Database, now hosted by Publisher’s Weekly.

Lahiri’s anthology will help, with short stories from some of the peninsula’s most important classic writers (Luigi Pirandello, Primo Levi, Antonio Tabucchi, Leonardo Sciascia, Cesare Pavese, Grazia Deledda, Alberto Moravia, et al) as well as a host of lesser-known authors (Anna Banti, Luce D’Eramo, Goffredo Parise, Beppe Fenoglio).

Lahiri uses her learned introduction to trace the trajectory of the Italian short story back to its origins beyond the well-known Boccaccio, namechecking Matteo Bandello and Masuccio Salernitano. Both of these authors (along with Boccaccio) composed what was known as novelle or short tales, stories that often had a moral slant or fable quality to them. They sometimes introduced characters and locales from faraway, and could be quite ribald, as they reveled in deconstructing male-female relationships.

It’s in the introduction that we also learn how Lahiri specifically sought out women writers, lesser-known writers, and overlooked writers in compiling the anthology. She says she selected stories with an eye particularly toward the experiences of women, as written by women or men. It is gratifying to find works in the anthology by Lalla Romano, Anna Maria Ortese, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg and Fausta Cialente—five writers whom author Dacia Maraini, one of Italy’s greatest living novelists, has identified as so significant as to be her “literary mothers.” (Maraini is not included in the anthology because Lahiri decided to feature only the work of deceased authors). The inclusion of these five writers, as well as other women, is critical because women authors are often passed over for prizes and less appreciated in Italy, and correspondingly less translated than their male counterparts abroad (according to Three Percent’s Translation Database, of the 45 books originally published in Italy that were translated from Italian into English in 2018, only seven were by women authors). Moreover, there are quite a few anthologies of Italian short stories where women writers are given scant attention. But not this anthology.

The Penguin work distinguishes itself in other ways, most notably by including more than a dozen works that have never been translated into English, such as “The Ambitious Ones,” a gem of a story by Elsa Morante, and “Dialogue with a Tortoise” by the much-celebrated Italo Calvino. That’s the power of an anthology like this: not merely compiling in a new place what already existed (which has a value in its own right, particularly here with literature not native to America), but indeed commissioning translations of works that heretofore were unavailable to the vast majority of Anglophone readers, since they do not read Italian.

Also of note among these new translations is “Invitation to Dinner” by Alba de Cespedes, which is narrated by an unnamed woman and which brings us the story of a dinner with an English officer in wartime Italy who helps transport the narrator’s brother back to Rome after the liberation of Northern Italy. The officer smugly tells them the world won’t automatically welcome Italy back into the fold after 20 long years of barbarous Fascism. The narrator seethes in silence, lamenting that:

… it wasn’t enough, as proof of civilization, to have manufactured that porcelain or to have written those books squeezed into the shelves that lined the walls of the library. We had to demonstrate once again, to prove, to pass, all forty-five million of us together, a lengthy exam.

The anthology also includes new, updated translations, and among those stories, Elio Vittorini’s “Name and Tears” feels like a revelation. It’s a fable and a mystery wrapped in one, with an extremely fluid translation by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell. The story is about a man searching for a woman. Is she real? He hears her sobbing, and at the end of the tale is left only with a “handkerchief, damp with her tears.” The book features a new translation of “The Long Voyage” by Leonardo Sciascia, a pivotal twentieth century Sicilian author who was the first to write incisively about the Mafia but whose prose style, as translator and scholar Frederika Randall has remarked, hasn’t always been served well by English translations.

The anthology caps a wave of newly translated works and retranslated works from Italy in recent years, that’s been fueled in part perhaps by interest in Ferrante’s works (and the furor over her identity; Ferrante is a pseudonym). For example, some of the novels of the seminal Ginzburg have been re-translated in recent years, including Jenny McPhee’s wonderful translation of Family Lexicon, published in 2017 by NYRB. Primo Levi’s oeuvre has also received the attention it deserves through the tome The Complete Works of Primo Levi, which was edited and translated by Ann Goldstein—a.k.a. Ferrante’s translator.

It is unsurprising, then, that the anthology reprints excerpts from some of the more notable translations appearing in recent years, including the stunningly good translation of Anna Maria Ortese’s “A Pair of Eyeglasses” by the Italian translation dream-team of McPhee and Goldstein (it appeared in the collection Neapolitan Chronicles, published by New Vessel Press in 2018). Ortese’s influence on her peers and on contemporary writers has been keenly felt, with an echo of her candid descriptions here of an impoverished neighborhood in post-war Naples, and the singular combination of superstition, fate, and politics that reigns over the characters’ lives evident in the works of Ferrante, among others. Ortese’s characters come alive in wonderful and wretched ways, in particular Eugenia, the innocent girl whose family’s poverty deprives her of glasses, leaving her practically in the dark for years, and Nunziata—the nagging, morose, unmarried aunt biding her time until death and who utters the unforgettable line, “My child, it’s better not to see the world than to see it.” The anthology also includes a short story by Levi about a centaur (as Lahiri notes in her preface to the story, Levi defied categories).

Equally as good is a story from Ginzburg called “My Husband,” expertly translated by Paul Lewis. Ginzburg always writes perceptively about family dynamics and here she has applied her skills to exposing some of the less savory aspects of marriage. When she writes about male-female relationships, she often exposes male infidelity or indifference but without any feminist grandstanding or judgement (she was a better person than I ever will be). In this short story, the husband rather boldly confesses that his surprising indiscretions have continued after the birth of the couple’s first child, in a scene that is nothing short of breathtaking:

He knelt down in front of me and kissed my bare arms. ‘Help me, I’m begging you,’ he said. ‘What am I going to do if you won’t help me?’ ‘But how can I possibly help you?’ I screamed, pushing him away and bursting into tears. Then my husband picked up Giorgio, kissed him, gave him to me and said, ‘Everything will be easier now, you’ll see.’

Reader, I will only tell you that “easier” would not be the word I’d have chosen to describe the finale of this stunning short tale of Ginzburg’s.

There are many theories about how translations should sound. Some translators and publishers prefer works that retain a trace of foreignness, while others say the translated works should read no differently than a work by an American author. These stories for the most part, like Lahiri’s translation of the Starnone novels, read so fluidly that you forget they are works in translation. Theory aside, there’s no arguing that these crisp translations will have the reader eagerly turning pages.

Those of us who have immersed ourselves in Italian literature face a particular conundrum: love of Italy and Italian culture seems to be ubiquitous in America these days, but knowledge and appreciation of the peninsula’s literary output is, in reality, quite limited. This is partly because other countries subsidize translations with prizes, grants and fellowships, and Italy does not. This is not a recent problem, and as a result, there’s long been a familiarity with, in particular, French and German authors. Americans know Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Herman Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, W.��G. Sebald, Gunter Grass and so on. But do they know Sciascia? Are Morante’s books taught widely in high schools and colleges here?

Here’s to that familiarity extending to Sunny Italy. Indeed, here’s hoping if the anthology is updated in the future, American readers will be arguing over whether it should have included a short story by Maraini or Niccolo Ammaniti or Donatella Di Pietrantonio. As Lahiri notes in her introduction, English-language literature dominates literary discussions far beyond the borders of Anglophone nations—something that “few, on the English-speaking side of the border, stop to question.” Perhaps they should. Lahiri, in her Rome diary, had described the sensation that the Italian language and its literature inspired in her as nothing short of “rapture.” Here’s hoping that rapture is catching. For she’s understood that Italy produces something even more satisfying—far more so, in fact—than a caffelatte or a slice of Neapolitan pizza.

Quo Vadis, Baby?��by Grazia Verasani
Translated from the Italian by Taylor Corse and Juliann Vitullo
180 pgs. | pb |��9781599103662 | $15.00

Review by Jeanne Bonner

The last time I wrote about Grazia Verasani’s Quo Vadis, Baby? (Mondadori, 2007) I was researching an article for Literary Hub about works by Italian women authors that hadn’t made it into translation on this side of the Atlantic. I can happily say the book has now been translated, and American readers can meet one of the most unlikely female protagonists coming out of Italian fiction, mystery or otherwise.

Her name is Giorgia Cantini, a private investigator who doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her. Moreover, she’s unmarried, unkempt, and unusual. Indeed, one of the most arresting parts of Quo Vadis, Baby?—and the later books in the Giorgia Cantini series, so far untranslated—is the narrator. Specifically, the extent to which she is atypical for an Italian novel—and atypical for any kind of female in the spotlight in Italy. It is to Verasani’s credit that she takes Giorgia, someone she depicts as physically unattractive (a death sentence in many ways for women in Italy), and makes her into someone who is psychologically attractive (as all truly sexy characters are).

Case in point, early in the novel, Giorgia’s eye becomes inflamed—a situation she fails to attend to, instead making it worse, like some schoolboy. Verasani writes, “If I were someone who puts on makeup, I’d try to camouflage the difference between one eye and the other. I place the lit cigarette on the edge of the sink, wash my face, pick up the cigarette again, blink my eyes and breath in.” Translation: She is not someone who cares about appearances. She is someone who drinks and smokes incessantly with a weariness that piques the reader’s attention. At one point she opines, “My god, I’m tired of being human, tired of it. I put out the cigarette under the faucet, rub some toothpaste on my teeth, then leave the house.” That one line alone tells us so much about this character.

Note, none of this is unusual for a P.I., but, again, it is unusual for the stereotype of Italian women we normally find in any kind of fiction, from books to TV to movies. (From personal experience, I can say that Italians can pick out a foreign woman on the street simply if her hair is still wet from the shower and devoid of any kind of styling).

Giorgia eschews many other traditionally female roles. She spends her nights haunting jazz clubs around Bologna until the wee hours. And in scene where she is having lunch with a client named Lucia Tolomelli, she orders a coffee and a Campari, and when asked if she has children, she not only replies “no” but adds, “fortunately.”

Like all good murder-mysteries, there is a plot and there is a backstory. And the backstory is engrossing: Giorgia’s sister decamped to Rome to pursue an acting career and wound up dead—from suicide. That was more than a decade ago and it’s never been clear what happened. As she goes about spying on unfaithful spouses for clients, Giorgia’s thoughts are never far from her sister’s tragic fate. Notably, Verasani intersperses letters from Ada into the narrative. Giorgia says, “I’ve transcribed a few sentences from the letter onto a note pad, and I read them now at traffic lights. The last year of my sister’s life is all there in those scattered pages.”

I see this, and I think, “Go on.” In fact, the efforts by the translators, Taylor Corse and Juliann Vitullo (both Arizona State University professors), to make this a smooth read pay off more often than not. It’s worth noting that Vitullo is a professor of Italian while Corse is a professor of English. Good translations, after all, depend on good writing (in the final language, in this case, English).

Letters can often be a successful narrative trope; here they work particularly well because they are letters from someone who has died. Someone whose death has yet to be explained, much less fully grieved (if that state exists). Interwoven into the plot about Ada and the letters is the mysterious identity of someone who might have seen Ada shortly before she committed suicide. Who is this person, known in Ada’s letters only as “A.”?

One would not want to insert too many spoilers into this review, but Ada’s is not the only suicide in the book, and the relationship between these two suicides, and the repercussions of both make for interesting reading.

Verasani has a way with sketching characters. While Giorgia is the star of the book (and the series), her father, who runs the agency with her, is also winning. He’s your typical curmudgeon but he’s not a stock character. Pointing to the computers that are now on the desks of agency employees, he says, “Is that box really necessary?” Lovable, but not without his peccadilloes, including a small alcohol problem (perhaps not surprising, given the grief he feels over the premature death of his daughter). After watching him quietly fumble around the office at one point, Giorgia points to the third drawer of his desk and says to him, “The bottle you’re looking for is there,” before walking out the door of the agency without another word.

Quo Vadis, Baby? is a fun read. But it also represents something else. The Italian prose that currently gets translated into English is overwhelming written by male writers (see Three Percent’s database, now hosted at Publisher’s Weekly; of the 35 Italian books listed in the database as published this year, only 5 were written by women authors).

Three of those books are mysteries by Andrea Camilleri, a beloved and veteran mystery writer, and he’s among several Italian male authors that perennially appear in the database of translated works. Here instead we have a mystery by a woman writer—a bit of a rarity. Verasani may not have Camilleri’s profile in Italy—few writers do—but she is quite accomplished. As the book’s publisher, Italica Press, notes, Quo Vadis, Baby? is a cult classic in Italy, and not only spawned five sequels but also a film adaptation by famed director Gabriele Salvatores.

Verasani’s prose—and the capable translation by Corse and Vitullo—is very accessible. In that sense, it may be less high-brow than other literary translations that make it to America (Camilleri’s books notwithstanding). This is a mystery novel, after all, for a general audience. But one that will appeal to American readers who enjoy, say, Donna Leon’s books.

For its part, Italica has built a solid reputation among indie presses, and is particularly noted for translations of medieval Italian classics, including works by Boccaccio and Guido Cavalcanti. The press has also brought English readers a fine selection of works by Italian women authors who may not be well-known outside of Italy, including an anthology that features Elena Ferrante and the next generation of female authors. Now, Verasani has taken her place among them.

Last but not least, who wouldn’t want to read a book called Quo Vadis, Baby? The original title (in Latin!, meaning “Where are you marching?”) was so cool, the translators didn’t even need to translate it.

And this is perhaps my way into Class (that was fun to type). Understanding a neighborhood and its denizens is key to understanding what an author like Pacifico may be up to in a book as odd as Class. Williamsburg in Class is the nexus of Italian hipsters. They meet, take drugs, laugh, fuck, grow weary, leave, return. It’s the sort of place that bohemians with varying degrees of talent flock to, bringing the first wave of gentrification. First wave gentrifiers often bemoan their cherished neighborhoods’ shift into commercial areas where moms push doublewide strollers into Lululemon. While they fail to see their role in the gentrification process, readers of their exploits are, allegedly, in on the secret. Dramatic irony notwithstanding, Class doesn’t seem concerned with judging the hipsters, even when they get up to some questionable activities. The reader is supposed to suspend that sort of moralizing. If that is impossible, the reader is screwed. Abandon the text ye who need redeeming characters.

Recently, Pacifico stated that the “problem with American books is that there must always be something moral and sympathetic happening between characters.” He may be onto something there, and I must admit that it’s refreshing to read a novel where manufactured sympathy is chucked. Nevertheless, Class confirmed my suspicion that the shallowness of hipsters is universal. That the Italians in Class are so informed by American culture, that they travel across the Atlantic to the hipster mecca of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, suggests a larger point about cultural hegemony, though I don’t feel comfortable forcing such an argument on Pacifico’s book.

But let’s look at this for a moment. One of the characters, Lorenzo, is a would-be filmmaker whose sole effort is a pretentious short film that bites off Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and scores of other hip influences. Another character, Marcello, is an aspiring rapper emulating American MCs. The one American we meet is James Murphy, a novelist in the vein of Franzen and Wallace, though his name is, of course, the same as the frontman of LCD Soundsystem, as hipster a band as one can find. Murphy’s work is criticized by the main narrator (more on that in a minute) and later, when the reader gets a peek into his notes, one gets the impression that Murphy is an aging hipster coasting off marginal talent. Oddly, the superficiality of these characters is what made me want to keep reading Class, even when they infuriated me. If they are products of a self-emulating culture that has now exported its cool shallowness, then great—Pacifico has made a grand statement. If not, if my reading is wrong (likely), then I’ll revert to the old reader-response cop-out and call it a day. In short: looking for one simple moral or overarching argument in Class is probably silly. But, American reader that I am, I looked anyway.

The narrator? For most of the book it’s Daria: Marxist sometime lover of Nicolino, the playboy of the group. Daria oversees events via the time-honored tradition of omniscient narrator, though quite literally: she sees into people’s thoughts. There are times when she can’t and has to make do providing half a conversation, pointing directly to the absurdity of fixed narration in fiction. Shortly after we’re finally introduced to her—well into the book—she leaves us, the narration taken over by another character before shifting again in a sort of montage. All of this occurs without warning and would be baffling were Pacifico not in possession of a deft hand. This unfixed narration is perhaps my favorite aspect of Class. I prefer it to a novel that feels slavishly devoted to presenting a reliable narrator.

Formal ambition helps this book, and the documentary that results is presented without overt sermonizing. Class may be a social commentary, a weirdly funny look at Italian hipsters, or a larger statement on cultural influence. The kaleidoscope of characters, whose actions and drives are never one-dimensional, eludes easy classification, which makes the entire book a joy. I found myself both rooting for these individuals and delighting in their ruin. Few books can get me to do that. But few books dare go where Class goes. The result is a shaggy, far-reaching, occasionally exasperating, consistently engaging book that is happier leaving an impression than making a grand statement. It’s a testimony to the possibilities of the contemporary novel.

Friday the 13th! Go catch some black cats before the weekend!

Here’s the beginning of Tiffany’s review:

I would like to pose the argument that it is rare for one to ever come across a truly passive protagonist in a novel. The protagonist (perhaps) of Three Light-Years, Claudio Viberti, is just that—a shy internist who lives in an apartment above his mother and below his ex-wife, and religiously eats boiled vegetables every day for lunch at the same cafe at the same table. Claudio spends over two years obsessing about Cecilia, a doctor and fellow colleague, until the day he is able to stutter out his profession of love for her, only to proceed in engaging with her in his car a safe distance from the hospital where they work. Following and/or during this engagement (not clear), Claudio also stumbles into a relationship with Cecilia’s sister, Silva, who shortly thereafter learns she is expecting. These ingredients and known plot “twists” are the makings of an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, except with a passive protagonist as a stand-in for McDreamy. Disappointingly, no attempts were really made to make the characters compelling or interesting beyond those of our typical hour-long sitcoms located in hospitals in Seattle and Los Angeles. The only interesting twist was that this hospital is located in a suburb of a large Italian city, and with that comes the typical romantic stereotypes.

For the rest of the review, go here

After working through Three Light-Years with determination and perseverance, I tried to identify other works that had truly passive protagonist. Honestly, the best I could conjure up were the isolated, solitude-loving types, but not ones who barely cross the barrier of being a prop and being a plot driver like dear Claudio. Perhaps that is the beauty of this work. However, the reader will likely remain skeptical of this model and distance themselves from the work because the reader is never provided with any insights into what is motivating the characters’ actions and decisions, or rather mistakes and poor choices. This is no surprise as the work seemed wholly unconcerned about the reader and more concerned presenting the the narcissistic tendencies of the two antagonists, the two sisters who stumble into affairs with Claudio without any analysis, question, or notion of attraction for him. Further, the reader will have to experience the same episode of the well-known sitcom not only from Claudio’s prop-like existence, but also from Cecila’s and Silva’s perspectives as well.

What was compelling and redeeming about Three Light-Years were the anecdotes about life peppered through the work at just the level to motivate the steadfast reader to continue. The following quotes provide a few examples:

“. . . [T]here is no present that is of greater interest to me than that distant past that I did not experience, about which I know almost nothing, and which I continue to imagine, fabricating other people’s memories.”

“As a general rule, it’s always best to know as little as possible about other people’s business. Not that it’s difficult to keep the things you accidentally come to know to yourself and pretend you know nothing. But even if you pretend not to know, you do know, and your life is invaded by the lives of others.”

“Memory is unfair . . . the person remembering is now older anymore disillusioned and forgetful than the young, deluded, determined protagonist of her memories. That’s why memory is unfair.”

Perhaps I have been reading too much Cesar Aira lately, but I appreciate being captivated by the awkward or self-imposed solitude of the characters of his works. This requires insights into the inner thoughts and motivations of those characters. Without being provided with such insights, the reader has to really justify why he or she has read Three Light-Years and, more importantly, whether engagement with the work was even possible.

The Four Corners of Palermo is not a novel but a collection of four episodes. Each chapter takes the hero, a gritty young crime reporter, to a different quarter of the city, where he finds a new noir crime scene and a new Venus-like lover. In the first chapter, he pieces together the family drama behind a shootout in the streets. The second has him investigating car bombings, and the third chasing a father who kidnapped his own children. The fourth has him befriending a daughter whose father is found beheaded in a town square, and ultimately deciding not to publish what he learns.

Di Piazza’s sensational material and nostalgic memory of the 1980s make his stories pleasurable, though vapid. The book suffers for its episodic structure, which leaves little opportunity for the nameless reporter to make much of an impression on the reader, and even less opportunity for him to learn something. A cast of shallow, personality-free female characters surrounds a “Gary Stu” protagonist, who runs from fashion model to murder scene without a misstep. It is a fun noir romp told in cinematic jump-cut scenes, but not a gratifying novel.

A former crime reporter, Di Piazza is clearly writing from experience. His bloody streets and severed heads are raw and vivid. But most disturbing—and, sadly, perhaps most realistic—is his depiction of journalistic ethics in a city under Mafia rule. Di Piazza’s hero lies to sources about his identity, allows a source to retroactively declare an interview off-the-record, and finally decides that keeping the truth buried is the only way to avoid further violence. “Don’t let the press write the whole truth,” he decides. While this may be realistic in a city that lives under constant fear of violence, it makes a disappointing end to the book. And it is surprising for an idealistic reporter who has not backed out of reporting the previous episodes. Anyone looking for a glimpse of gutsy, uncompromised reporting on Italian organized crime would be better off turning to Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano’s 2006 “non-fiction novel” on the brutal Neapolitan mob. But remember that its author will spend the rest of his life under a 24-hour police escort, fearing reprisal. Maybe Di Piazza’s fictional reporter should not be faulted for protecting his safety.

Di Piazza’s book drips with nostalgia. It is peppered with references to Pink Floyd and John Coltrane that admirers of the era will enjoy. His loving details of the city are less successful, however. The author’s Palermo never becomes more than a lifeless backdrop before which his reporter runs. This is despite Di Piazza’s apparent attempts to glorify the city by throwing in landmarks or descriptions of gelato and sfincione pizza that sound as if written by Sicily’s tourism bureau. He may convince you that Sicily has beautiful views and rich food, but will not leave you with vivid images of Palermo nor any burning wanderlust. Given the book’s title and efforts, this is a disappointment.

While I know from experience the challenges of Italian-to-English translation, I find Shugaar’s translation a bit too literal for my taste. This is most jarring in moments when Shugaar retains the Italian fondness for colons and semicolons. It works well in some instances, but can seem quite misplaced in street dialogue (as in, “Don’t talk crap: we tell you to go kill that traitor to his family and when you come back you’ve let him shoot you.”). Fortunately, Shugaar hits his stride in a few of the book’s most exciting scenes, producing some beautiful moments. The strongest passages have the reporter discovering his lover’s addiction, falling in love with a beautiful but tortured fashion model, and sneaking into prison to visit a key witness.

Di Piazza’s book is a loving, though sometimes dull, portrait of a legendary city. Despite a few chilling passages, its noir verve does not come near living up to the author’s hopeful nods to Dashiell Hammett. Four Corners of Palermo makes a fun sensationalist read for lovers of Mafia fiction, but not a literary novel.

This book was published in English in 2012, but considering the attention Ferrante has been getting for her work since then, this is a very appropriate “Better late than never” kind of review. I’ve yet to read anything of Ferrante’s, but am absolutely aching to after all the high praise and descriptions of her writing.

Acacia O’Connor is a first wave U of R MALTS alumna working from Italian into English. She works at Columbia University and shares a subway stop with Dr. Craig Spencer, the first Ebola patient in New York City. Instead of attending ALTA 2014, she thought it would be fun to run a marathon, at night, on the Las Vegas strip. (I was also with her at the opening night midnight-showing of the first part of the last Harry Potter movie. We did not dress up.)

Here’s the beginning of Acacia’s review:

It hasn’t quite neared the pitch of the waiting-in-line-at-midnight Harry Potter days, but in small bookstores and reading circles of New York City, an aura has attended the novelist Elena Ferrante and her works. One part curiosity (Who is she?), one part eager devotion (Where is she, I want to be her best friend!), enthusiasm over Ferrante was reignited when the third book in Ferrante’s Neapolitan novel series was published this month.

Her fans, reviewers, and interviewers don’t know who she is, where she is, whether her name is really Elena Ferrante, how much her books are drawn from her life or the lives of friends, family. Even her translator, the fantastic Ann Goldstein, has corresponded with her only sparingly. What is known is that her works have great, deep, broad feelings. Mammoth feelings. Feelings like a spiny barrier reef coating the entire bottom of the Mare di Napoli. And readers, it seems, are really into those feels.

I, too, was caught up. My Brilliant Friend evokes those familiar yet almost indescribable feelings about long friendships, adolescence, and home. You’re inextricably tied to a person, a place, but you hate how strong the connection is, how it drags you back in when you try to escape it; slowly it tears you apart.

That sounds melodramatic. In real life, we tend to downplay drama, shake off the pain. Feels are for Tumblr. But those moments of “suffering” (perhaps the most prevalent word in My Brilliant Friend) exist. When elementary school “best friends” were established and betrayed. When a very close friend goes off and gets married young. When someone you love moves smack dab across the country. Rarely do we find the tension, the dissatisfaction, or the fear created by the completely natural and expected changes in friendships articulated as clearly as we find it in these novels.

Ferrante captures the unnerving and beautiful elements of human relationships with vivid precision and dramatic seriousness. While the main character and narrator of My Brilliant Friend is Elena Greco, the true protagonist is the bond between Elena, called Lenu, and her childhood friend, Raffaela “Lila” Cerrullo. Elena and Lila are two children of a lively, dirty, poverty-stricken ghetto in Naples. Elena and Lila are best friends, but at times one or the other of them isn’t so sure of it. The friendship is dynamic, as much in flux as anything in their world—a world where adults grease the palms of Mafiosi, scream at one another, beat their children, and throw irons out of windows.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Her fans, reviewers, and interviewers don’t know who she is, where she is, whether her name is really Elena Ferrante, how much her books are drawn from her life or the lives of friends, family. Even her translator, the fantastic Ann Goldstein, has corresponded with her only sparingly. What is known is that her works have great, deep, broad feelings. Mammoth feelings. Feelings like a spiny barrier reef coating the entire bottom of the Mare di Napoli. And readers, it seems, are really into those feels.

I, too, was caught up. My Brilliant Friend evokes those familiar yet almost indescribable feelings about long friendships, adolescence, and home. You’re inextricably tied to a person, a place, but you hate how strong the connection is, how it drags you back in when you try to escape it; slowly it tears you apart.

That sounds melodramatic. In real life, we tend to downplay drama, shake off the pain. Feels are for Tumblr. But those moments of “suffering” (perhaps the most prevalent word in My Brilliant Friend) exist. When elementary school “best friends” were established and betrayed. When a very close friend goes off and gets married young. When someone you love moves smack dab across the country. Rarely do we find the tension, the dissatisfaction, or the fear created by the completely natural and expected changes in friendships articulated as clearly as we find it in these novels.

Ferrante captures the unnerving and beautiful elements of human relationships with vivid precision and dramatic seriousness. While the main character and narrator of My Brilliant Friend is Elena Greco, the true protagonist is the bond between Elena, called Lenu, and her childhood friend, Raffaela “Lila” Cerrullo. Elena and Lila are two children of a lively, dirty, poverty-stricken ghetto in Naples. Elena and Lila are best friends, but at times one or the other of them isn’t so sure of it. The friendship is dynamic, as much in flux as anything in their world—a world where adults grease the palms of Mafiosi, scream at one another, beat their children, and throw irons out of windows.

The two grow up dreaming of gem-filled treasure chests, they dream of escape through education, wealth, and notoriety. They are each vying, sometimes together but more often independently, to become Masters of their Universe. At first, the Universe is bordered by the cluster of homes that make up their neighborhood, with the stradone at its extreme border. But as they grow, they push the boundaries of their parents’ world. Like two people on a single ladder, they push one another up and push against one another. Where the ladder leads, they don’t know . . . but wherever it leads, it’s better than the perpetual grime of the neighborhood—that much is clear. They might fall off into the routine existence of their parents, but then again they might reach somewhere beyond.

In one another, they recognize a competitor and a confidant. From an early age, Elena finds that the only thing that gives her dedicated studying any color is discussing it with Lila, who is rangy, mercurial, and completely captivating. Lila’s feelings and motivations, on the other hand, aren’t entirely clear. She’s one of the cagiest characters in all of literature. While writer-Elena hints that she has figured Lila out, she plays her hand carefully, ensuring we share in the ignorance and confusion of her younger self. The mystery grows as the girls enter their teenage years and their paths start to diverge. To Elena and to the reader, Lila’s choices appear illogically banal and suspiciously disappointing. If survival in the neighborhood involves building up the hand you’re dealt, Lila is either playing the wrong cards or is about to pull off the biggest bluff imaginable. In the shocking festivities of the final pages of Book I, you find out who got had.

While the book has a handful of families at its heart, it gives the impression of a whole undiscovered world, which Ferrante brings into being, page by page. And translator Ann Goldstein is our faithful screever: she traces over this world with bright chalk, holds your hand and, Dick-Van-Dyke-style, jumps you into the picture. It needs to be said that not only are these books deftly and beautifully rendered into English, the speed with which Goldstein has produced them—while also holding a position as editor of the _New Yorker_—is incredibly impressive.

*

For a number of reasons, one in particular, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook sprung to mind while reading this book. While the themes of the two books are distinct, each boasts an emotional timbre that is at once exhausting and addicting. Both books chronicle the narrators’ states of mind in minute detail, truthfully and powerfully, even as their worlds crumble around them.

The phrase “female friendship” has appeared frequently in reviews about the Neapolitan novels; also, the word “feminist.”

Why is that? There is the obvious fact that Elena and Lila are girls and Ferrante is also a woman— I’m not being an ass. My question is, why is “female friendship” more accurate than simply “friendship”? Is My Brilliant Friend more a book about women specifically than a book about human beings generally? I really don’t think so, and I worry that the appearance of this language ultimately diminishes the novel.

Enter again The Golden Notebook, which also revolves around the lives of two friends striving to make sense of a shifting society, almost at the cost of sanity. Lessing’s novel has often been called a great feminist work, a label the author resisted day after day until
she died at the age of 94. She thought it missed the point.

“Oh, it’s just stupid; I’ve seen it so often,” Lessing said. “I mean, there’s nothing feminist about The Golden Notebook. The second line is: ‘As far as I can see, everything is cracking up.’ That is what The Golden Notebook is about!”

I don’t believe those who emphasize the female in these works are necessarily trying to deny other, broader qualities, but I fear that is the effect. Qualifying descriptions and praise (“a brilliant depiction of female friendship”… “a great feminist work”) puts Great works of Literature in some subsidiary genre. The labels are overburdened. They are by their very nature delimiting. They strip away the universality of Literature, leaving behind the partial, the particular, the confined. They convey: this is about ladies, for ladies, by a lady writer.

Strike the words “female” and “feminist” and see what you get: a nuanced friendship, a striking coming-of-age story, a powerful work. A novel about human beings immobilized by the numbing, normalizing tendencies of poverty. Two young people trying to disprove that worn dictum “geography is destiny” by any means necessary. A narrator trying to shape an identity and enter new realms, chained by her past and by the love she bears for others.

Now tell me that ain’t universal.

Generally, I’m a suspicious reader; big claims scare me off. Having never watched a Fellini film and with only Calvino and Pavese as literary signposts, I entered the novel (guided by veteran translator Michael F. Moore) with a healthy amount of skepticism. Just a few chapters in, however, I knew that even if Genovesi hadn’t managed to overcome cliché, he had indeed created an electric book, a book that stirs, and one that you can’t help living—and living with—along the way. It’s fair to say that Genovesi’s English debut touches all the right spots and echoes back just enough universalized Weltschmerz to leave the reader cringing over mistakes they too once made. And, for that, you’re in it until the end.

Live Bait launches with a memory, as things usually do: a fused snapshot, a spark of what was circling through a narrative live wire. Yet for our antihero Fiorenzo Marelli, it is a recollection that continues on, as some would put it, in phantomlike form; he has already lost part of himself (literally) before he hits that strange, dazed, and oddly jaded limbo called high school. This first brush with emptiness has cleared the way for the Italian metalhead’s Bildungsroman to creep into being, made evident as he so casually philosophizes in the novel’s first episode: “Because real emptiness isn’t finding nothing. It’s finding nothing where there’s supposed to be something.” And not so strangely, it is just this emptiness that continues to occupy his life; it is a nebulous hollow that, like the ditches where he finds respite while fishing for bottom feeders, belies a host of other organisms underneath. Now, maybe I’m mixing my reviewer metaphors here. Even so, I’d also hedge a bet that it is by crafting just this eddy of images floating in and out of view that Genovesi grasps onto our “real” world.

The novel rightly begins with a nineteen-year-old Fiorenzo, handless, rehearsing with his band Metal Devastation. He has recently lost his mother and has become increasingly estranged from his father. Fiorenzo’s a smart kid—just let him tell you—although he refuses to continue on as society expects. School, work, all of it can wait. When his father offers to put up a talented outsider from the bicycling team he coaches, Fiorenzo hastily retreats; sensing the aloof new youngster a threat to his throne, he moves into their family bait shop to live among the worms. Cue the soft shuffling of little grubby insects for some novelistic ambience. We hear him muse in his bed for a while: “And there I was, lying down on sacks of amaretto-and-cherry flavored ground bait, thinking this was the sound you heard in the coffin.” He’ll keep that little tidbit for later to write some awful lyrics about his melancholy experience.

Days go by, but Fiorenzo doesn’t budge. His town, Muglione, seems to be rotting. He is cast into a net of familial and social backwash and, feeling the routine ennui that accompanies small-town life, sets about to become famous—it’s what he deserves of course, having spent years as a social outcast—along with his band mates. This includes one chubby guy who, as Fiorenzo relays, believes that, “T-Shirts are the cages of the system.” Their debut at a local festival is on the horizon. But things don’t go as planned. No one is listening. In fact, they’re booed off stage. He isn’t ready. The world is shit. He is ready. Ready for something. He’s angry. Maybe he has the right to be. There is some really rich teenage angst to be mined here, and Genovesi accomplishes it better than Salinger, in my humble opinion. Fiorenzo may sense that things are “phony,” but at least he knows how to take a cosmic joke.

And the saga wouldn’t be complete without a beautiful woman to set off the story, and it just so happens that this woman, believing Italian men to be little boys gone bald, is just curious enough—and perhaps I’m being generous here—to let Fiorenzo in. Her name is Tiziana Cosci: witty, intelligent, a girl with great tits but still plagued with the same stifling insecurity that so many thirty-somethings in quarter-life crisis have yet to shake off. Those sighs of relief—you survived your teenage years!—that you let out while reading passages fervidly narrated by Fiorenzo now get caught in your throat. The anxiety, the shame, the offhand words imprinted on your tongue all still exist; now you’re just better at hiding it. But that’s where the real story begins, where the two fronts of weakness and doubt and curiosity collide: two bodies, strange, new in that I’d do anything to just touch your skin teenage kind-of-way, enter a half-finished tango to the grunts of old Italian men.

I’m not sure if I’m being nostalgic or not—strangely enough, I too had a 19-year-old metalhead boyfriend who is strikingly like the protagonist—but the only word that I’ll allow myself to describe Fiorenzo is “tender,” perhaps because that word also appears on the back cover. I say tender knowing that tenderness is a condition laced with a smattering of other emotions and conditions that we tend to shed with age: a tender narcissism, a tender cruelty, a tender misfit-hood, a tender awkward few fingers not reaching their mark in bed. And this tenderness is also always physical for Fiorenzo, from his phantom limb to the first amorous caresses that he shares with Tiziana. I closed the book a few times in embarrassment for our man on the ground, who, knowing his limits, spells out the delicate situation quite concretely: “Listen, I don’t know how to put it inside, but I can recognize a carp bite a mile away.”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a cluster of minor characters that animate the book, types that all those stuck in a languishing little town might recognize. My favorite is a certain Mazinger, who, outfitted in ridiculous hand-me-ups from a fashion-slave grandson, hangs around every corner speaking “like a Japanese robot.” We first encounter him in the bait shop, telling Fiorenzo, “YOUR—DAD—IS—A—SHIT.” Mazinger is part of an elderly troop calling themselves the “Muglione Guardians.” These old men must fight off the gangs of Romanians and other Eastern Europeans who have found their way into the grand village of Muglione, although these Romanian gangsters are not really gangsters, nor are they Romanian. Then there’s Mirko, the little champ set to win back Muglione’s honor. Gripped by those tender years of adolescence, he’s a kid who just wants to fit in and who winds up carrying Fiorenzo’s biggest secret. Put all of these folks together in Genovesi’s world and you’re stuck to the book like glue.

Underneath the jocular weavings of Fiorenzo and his crew, some real tensions—and by real I aim to underscore the tangible anxieties that inevitably work their way into conversation when speaking about the economic situation in Europe at present—poke through. Muglione comes to represent a fierce attachment to tradition that is quickly dying with its elderly brigades. The only things that seem to be prospering are the shops and other business ventures run by immigrants, and anyone who has spent time in Europe knows that the politics around this new class of workers is on the tip of every tongue.

As for the translation, it hits head on. And it is just this kind of book that demands a kind of lived translation—with all of its dialogue and code-switching between generations and genre—in order to keep up with the curious humor that runs right through. I’m hesitant to mention any points where I stumbled in my own reading, not only because I’m not familiar with the source text, but also because I think that Moore has captured so much of what pulled at my heart in his playful rendering. But perhaps as a note for future readers (of which I hope there will be many), I’ll mention that there are a few points where you’re not sure if it’s a teenager or his father speaking. It’s hard for me at twenty-five to read the word “prick” where the word “dick” seems called for; again, I’m drawing on my ex-metal head’s vocabulary. I also learned a new word—“suck-ass”—that I’ll be employing more often. Friends beware.

En fin, Live Bait won’t change your life. But it will open you up. It will open up that part of you that you’ve been trying to cover with dirt and paper in your attempt at adulthood. It’s not mawkish. There’s no grand plan. And there’s some cliché. But most of all, there is tenderness, and I would read the novel again just to feel that bit of warmth emanating from its pages.

If you’re looking for some post-WWII-themed, summer reading with disturbing imagery that would blow Jane Yolen and her time-traveling YA hit out of the shark-infested waters (don’t ask about the sharks), this book should be on your list. The rich, blood-red cover treatment, the title, the grisly things Peter (of the ) mentions in his review . . . It’s enough to make you literally grimace and wonder how many episodes of Keeping up with the Kardashians you can self-medicate with to make the entire world go away but still not land yourself in the camp of comatose self-loathing. Basically, if you want a visceral and historical heebie-jeebie fest, this is it.

And yes: Kardashians and WWII. You saw that combination here first, folks.

Anyway, here’s a part of Peter’s review—and enjoy the weekend!:

The Skin is Malaparte’s description of this moral plague. He writes about a character of the same name who accompanies a band of Pollyannaish American soldiers as they go about Naples acting as both conquerors and liberators. He bears witness to the variety of horrors that come at the end of a long war: starvation, slavery, casual murder, careless disposal of the dead, and the caustic nature with which the rich feed upon the poor (both literally and metaphorically), to name a few.

But these atrocities are merely a symptom of, or coexist with, the moral plague. Malaparte bemoans the easy way Neapolitans bend to the wishes of their American conquerors. “It was enough that a child should put into its mouth a candy offered to it by an American soldier, and its innocent soul would be corrupted.” The Neapolitans are too willing to trade national identity, pride, and dignity, just to get along with the new powers that be.

The Americans, for their part, approach this horrid landscape as if they weren’t at least partially responsible, and so they become the target of Malaparte’s most acidic sarcasm. The Americans of The Skin remain ignorant of Neapolitan culture. One American repeatedly speaks French to Malaparte and others, suggesting that, to him, all cultures other than his own are more or less the same. The Americans take what they can from the country they’ve razed with bombs and tanks, all the while holding themselves blameless. It rings true.

For the rest of the review, go here.