��by Edith Bruck (La Nave di Teseo, 2021)

Review by Jeanne Bonner

When Edith Bruck was 12 years old, she was deported to Auschwitz, and was immediately separated from her mother in a brutal scene. In her new memoir, Bruck writes that later, after being yanked away, another prisoner who had been at the camp long enough to become a hated kapo pointed to smoke from the gas chambers and said, “You see that smoke?” When she nodded, he said her mother had been burnt alive, adding, “Your mother has become soap like mine.”

More than 75 years later, the Hungarian-born Bruck remains committed to telling the story of the Holocaust. The 89-year-old transnational Italian writer’s new book, Il Pane Perduto, is one of five finalists for the Strega award, Italy’s highest literary prize, which will be awarded on July 8. For the woman known to some as “Signora Auschwitz,” it’s of a piece with a long body of literature in which she has likened the experience of surviving the Holocaust to being eternally pregnant with a monster she cannot abort. And she has pledged to bear witness until she can’t.

Only a handful of her works have been published in English, most notably (New York: Modern Language Association, 2006). Scholar Gabriella Romani, who co-translated that novel, has called Bruck “the most prolific writer of Holocaust narrative in the Italian language,” and she’s arguably one of the last remaining great Holocaust-era chroniclers in any language.

In Il Pane Perduto (the title means literally “lost bread”; no English translation yet), Bruck can often seem clear-eyed about some of the most horrific moments of her life—and some of the most horrific moments of recent human history. And it’s very possible the Italian language can take some credit. After moving to Rome in the 1950s, Bruck began writing in Italian, instead of Hungarian. As scholar Philip Balma noted in his book, , Bruck adopted the Italian language as a “shield that would allow her to dive back into her painful past without directly reliving the suffering.” In an interview in April broadcast from the Villino Corsini Library in Rome, Bruck said, “Language is my country.”

Her sober approach to recounting the twentieth century’s greatest shame may also stem from the mission she gave herself when she survived: Bruck believes her debt to those who perished—including her parents and a beloved brother—entails bearing witness, until her last day of Earth, if need be. As her friend and peer, Primo Levi, observed in his preface to her book , Bruck was someone who “escaped in order to narrate” the saga of the Holocaust. Levi, who also survived Auschwitz, called her body of work an “unforgettable testimony.”

Bruck expounded upon her mission at length in a 2014 nonfiction book whose title, (which means “Mrs. Auschwitz”), refers to the inadvertent nickname that emerged in her encounters with nervous Italian students who knew little about the Holocaust. In the book (published by Marsilio; no English translation), she writes about struggling to keep up with a grueling schedule of school visits she agreed to make. She ultimately decides to continue, and that resolve makes it unsurprising that she is again in the literary limelight as a finalist for the Strega award, which is an equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.

What made Bruck keep up her frequent school appearances as a witness is also what makes her work, including the new book that has yet to be translated, essential reading: We still need reminders about the horrors of the Holocaust. The memoir includes a moment when she finds herself briefly at the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where she is ordered to drag the weak prisoners to the “death tent” where a pile of human skeletons lay (Note: translations are my own). Some detainees managed to say to her, before dying, “Tell what happened. They won’t believe us but tell the story, if you survive, for us, too.”

While Bruck has written novels and other works of literature that are not related to the Holocaust, she is especially masterful at describing the Shoah. She depicts the act of remembering Auschwitz for survivors as the experience of harboring “a rampaging tenant inside of themselves,” one which they cannot “deliver” or evict by talking or writing about it. She knows: in her early career, she thought each time she wrote about the Holocaust in a book, a part of the “monster conceived at Auschwitz” would seep out of her.

That’s an incredibly graphic, extreme way to depict survival. In this new work, she uses subtler methods that nonetheless demonstrate the hold Auschwitz (or any concentration camp) has on survivors. In the early years after the war, she writes that she and fellow survivors wandered about, not just dazed but also sick over not belonging anywhere. Something essential had been severed (“spezzato”); the survivors were ill at ease when they were alone with themselves and also while in the company of others. It’s not surprising then that in the new memoir she writes that her “true brothers and sisters” are the people she met in the Lager.

Bruck has remained remarkably faithful to her teenage pledge to bear witness. But as she might argue, what choice does she have? In Il Pane Perduto, she writes that when she was finally liberated at age 14, “a sad man” approached her and transcribed her information on a piece of paper, including her birthdate, the concentration camps where she had been confined, and her prisoner number. Then he gave her the document. She still has it—a lifetime membership card she can never discard.

One of the most notable aspects of Bruck’s body of work is the innovation she’s employed in recounting the Holocaust, often using unusual or unlikely angles to illuminate her personal experiences as a prisoner of the Nazis and the wider travails of European Jews before, during and after the Holocaust. For example, one short story called “Silvia” is narrated by the young son of a high-level Nazi official in Germany who finds a young Jewish stowaway and brings her home to live with him. Bruck manages to evoke sympathy for the boy while fully enunciating every abhorrent nuance of the anti-Semitism that has infected his parents and his society. Similarly, Bruck employs an approach that’s almost brutal in its honesty in the book, Signora Auschwitz. What’s more, it highlights an aspect of a survivor’s life that may be invisible to many (the work of educating the younger generations), while also immortalizing an unforgettable nickname.

The new book is more straightforward, as memoirs often can be because they trace a part of a person’s actual life. But that’s appropriate at this moment for such a prolific writer. Bruck’s new memoir caps off a career of triumphs and adds to a rich body of work. And she really isn’t finished. While promoting the memoir this year and participating in myriad events connected with the Strega award season, Bruck found time to publish another book of poetry. Because she’s going to tell the story of the Holocaust until she can’t.

(The large image associated with this post is copyrighted by the

by Elena Ferrante
283 pgs. | pb | 9788833571683 | €19,00

Review by Jeanne Bonner

If all had gone as planned—which is to say if a global pandemic hadn’t bulldozed our normal lives—this summer, you might have been reading Ann Goldstein’s English translation of La vita bugiarda degli adulti, the new novel by Elena Ferrante. Instead, we’re still stuck in a viral vortex and the release of the English version, entitled , has been postponed until September.

So while we wait, I’ll give you a review of the Italian original—and as far as plot, pacing and characters are concerned, it really doesn’t make any difference. I’m not employed by Ladbrokes or anything but I would wager there is essentially zero chance that while Ferrante’s Italian original engrossed me, Goldstein’s English version won’t. Goldstein has built a sterling reputation by translating not only all of Ferrante’s works into English but also by overseeing the release of Primo Levi’s Complete Works in English. Primo Levi, folks.

Indeed, Goldstein is positioned well because I see the new novel—about a young girl living in Naples at the dawn of her teenage years who uncovers details about her family history—as a compromise between the sweeping four-book Neapolitan series that began with My Brilliant Friend and Ferrante’s earlier novels. A compromise in terms of length—Bugiarda runs 300 pages—and one in terms of scope and ambition, too.

It’s a distinction worth noting because I consider the earlier novels—The Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter, in particular—small literary earthquakes that unleashed something powerful and at times disturbing. (As James Wood said in his famous New Yorker review about Ferrante’s work, “It assails bourgeois niceties and domestic proprieties; it rips the skin off the habitual.”)

In fact, when I recommend Ferrante to readers, I always tell them to read those two early novels. And as far as the depiction of female characters in fiction goes, I think I have good reason. The Days of Abandonment is, after all, where the main character, Olga, who has been cuckolded not only by her husband but by the family’s underage babysitter, viciously attacks the pair on the street in broad daylight, noting as she strides toward them that she “felt no desire to cry or scream or ask for explanations, only a black mania for destruction.” (Translation care of, who else? Ann Goldstein). A black mania for destruction. Like a ferocious Angela Bassett setting fire to the car in that scene from the movie “Waiting to Exhale”!

Ferrante’s female characters are fully-dimensional, nuanced, flawed individuals, like centuries’ worth of male characters. Reading the two earlier novels, I’ve fantasized about a re-boot of The Odyssey, with Penelope as Odysseus—the one who wanders, sometimes recklessly. Perhaps it’s because as Meghan O’Rourke once noted in the Guardian, Ferrante writes about “women’s experience without trying to find anything redemptive in it, and in doing so peels away superficial assumptions.” In other words, we women are crappy, too. And this is especially obvious in spare, concentrated works like The Days of Abandonment.

It’s not that I, too, didn’t ravenously read all four of the books in the Neapolitan series—I did. And certainly, Ferrante continues in the series with the themes from the earlier novels, but I don’t think they had the same literary quality as the shorter works. I think, as some Italian critics pointed out, the writing (in the original Italian) was sloppy in places. There were sections where the prose could have been tighter, improved.

But not the storytelling. Never the storytelling.

All the works—including this new book—showcase Ferrante’s sterling storytelling abilities. In fact, it almost doesn’t make any sense to parse too much or question narrative decisions when, at the end of the day, the new novel is suspenseful—a page-turner.

Ferrante uses a sophisticated form of bait and switch in this new work by training our eyes immediately on one set of ruptures—between Giovanna, the young protagonist, and her parents, and between her parents and her father’s sister—while setting us up to swoon when another, equally devastating schism emerges.

I won’t say any more about that because to do so would require a spoiler alert. But with both of these plot points, she reaches into her novelistic toolbox and pulls out the implements she wields most authoritatively: moments of discomfort, predatory relationships, awkward scenes between loved ones, infidelity, power, not to mention something as fundamental as the nature of evil (and how it manifests itself in our everyday relationships). At one point in the new novel, the narrator reflects on something Ferrante terms ‘un’impressione di malvagità.” Malvagità—there’s a Ferrantian flourish. The word refers to a state of wickedness, of cruelty.

Like in all of her works, she has crafted characters whose desperate longing and insidious desires are—in the language of web analytics—sticky. This is after all the woman who describes in Frantumaglia her tried and true approach to writing as putting her fingers inside wounds of hers that have not completely healed, that are in fact still “infected.”

Such an approach makes us want to know more—to read more. Here, when we see the young narrator’s attraction for the aunt with whom her parents have broken off relations, we get it, even as we can also instantly see the aunt as a predator who won’t be content to simply get to know her estranged niece (single, flashy and childless, Zia Vittoria drives fast, curses and talks about romantic relationships in non-Hallmark Channel tones). Much of the early part of the book depends on building suspense as Giovanna is drawn into her aunt’s confidence and her world. What will happen when Giovanna sees her next?

Ferrante’s writing about friendships, particularly between women, and about relationships between mothers and daughters has been widely covered in previous reviews of the earlier works. Here in the new novel we have a few other relationships to which she turns her unforgiving laser focus: the father-daughter dynamic; the dynamic between a child and her parents’ friends; and as mentioned above, the familial ties between a niece and her aunt, or really any estranged relative.

Ferrante always goes where the emotional fires are raging, whatever their cause or attributes. One fire, in general, is the evolution from our childhood views of our parents in their adult world, and our more mature perspectives. That pivot—which here is buttressed by a short treatise on class relations in Naples—is at the heart of the novel. Early on in the book, Giovanna observes, “Imparai sempre �辱ù a mentire ai miei genitori.” She finds herself lying more and more to her parents—and as the book goes on, she learns just how much her parents have been lying. To her. To each other—and to themselves.

Here to exploit this shift is the aunt. Indeed, Ferrante shines when it comes to fictional villains. In one scene between Giovanna and Zia Vittoria, the young girl seeks comfort by proposing to confide a family secret, evidence of which she has recently witnessed. But the aunt isn’t playing along; when asked that she not tell anyone Giovanna’s secret, she replies acidly that she doesn’t make those kinds of promises, adding, “Fottiti.” Literally: Fuck yourself. Screw you. (I’m holding my breath to see how Ann translates this). The aunt, who never made it out of the old, rough-and-tumble neighborhood and sprinkles her conversation with saucy bits of dialect, goes on to say that the bad thoughts you keep inside become ferocious dogs that bite your head off while you sleep. Oh wait, there’s more! Giovanna is so desperate for some communion, desperate to unload this awful thing she has witnessed that she finally reveals what she knows, begging her aunt not to tell her father. To which Zia Vittoria replies, “You think your father gives a damn about that?”

Boom.

Remember that moment when you realized your parents weren’t saints? That your relatives were maybe all drunks? The time you tried to tell a loved one your deepest fears? Or your closest cousin said the guy you loved was a loser? You’ll be reliving all those salient moments of your maturation while taking in this new Ferrante book.

In this one quick comment from her aunt, the young, fragile narrator is not only deprived of the succor typically afforded by an important adult relationship in her life, but she is told that her father—whom she thinks of as a sensitive intellectual—is so callous as not to care about this particular secret, which will ultimately devastate Giovanna’s household.

It’s a salient, unflinching Ferrantian moment. But one that’s unfortunately dimmed by the nature of the book’s main character, which is to say Giovanna. I don’t find Giovanna quite as sympathetic as Olga, say, or even Elena in the Neapolitan series, though all three are bookish female characters who clash one way or another with men or the world men created. She’s also less sympathetic than another young teenage protagonist in recent Italian fiction: the narrator of Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s A Girl Returned (also translated by Goldstein and also published by Ferrante’s publishing house). This dampened the appeal of the book somewhat for me.

Some of the plot also strains credulity. At the outset, the girl is embarking on her early teenage years and by book’s end, she’s hardly much older. Yet she comes and goes from home as she sees fit, traveling twice from Naples to Milan without her parents and without, say, a school chaperone or trusted relative. I suppose part of this freedom can be chalked up to the turmoil stemming from the book’s second schism.

There’s also a promising but underexploited subplot involving a charismatic man who’s deeply religious. Giovanna swoons over him, and Ferrante effectively conveys a dynamic that isn’t simply that of a young girl meeting an older, alluring man but rather of the frisson new acquaintances can stimulate. Yet I was maybe expecting a bit more from this.

Similarly, the book’s conclusion feels vaguely unsatisfying, perhaps because Ferrante is such a good storyteller and she drills down on themes that are, again, sticky, all of which lead me to expect more. It’s almost as if a final chapter were lopped off during the editing process. The last scene certainly signals Giovanna is growing up, entering the woefully mendacious world of adults. But the conclusion neither ties up narrative strands nor deliberately leaves things unresolved to reflect the sense of flux that permeates adult life.

I say all this full-well knowing that Anglophone Ferrante fans will seek out the new book, come September (and I am recommending as much myself). In fact, I’ll be cheered by any reader who picks up this work of translated Italian fiction. Besides, it’s always entertaining to see what Ferrante will produce when she mixes women, men, love, discomfort and growing pains together.

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.

The nonfiction book is divided into what Quignard terms 10 treatises, but it often reads like a collection of connected fragments from the author’s journal. Entries are separated by a small bullet point, and the book feels in sections like a prose poem, or really, at times a riddle. As The New Yorker has noted, Quignard is a writer with “an oblique, aphoristic bent.” In an interesting and detailed Translator’s Note at the end of the book, the author is quoted as saying the work falls into a category called “speculative rhetoric,” and it’s a type of writing, he says, that dates back to the invention of philosophy. Readers schooled not only in the classics but in the classics in their original language (Greek, Latin, French, et al) will be in good stead since the superb translators, Matthew Amos and Fredrik Rönnbäck, preserve the richness of the original text by including snippets of the original languages.

Quignard, a noted novelist, music aficionado, and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, is adept at illuminating the overlooked role that our sense of hearing plays in all things and all thoughts. One of the most poignant examples is St. Peter, the Catholic Apostle who is considered the religion’s first Pope. According to the Christian Bible, Peter thrice denied Jesus as he was being led off to slaughter, only to hear the sound of a cock crowing, as his master had warned. Quignard tells us in the book’s first treatise, called “The Tears of Saint Peter,” “It is said that as Peter grew older he could no longer bear cocks.” Indeed, he had any kind of animal of flight in and around his home killed. As I read this, I found myself grieving, if you will, for St. Peter, across the centuries. How he must have regretted his denial, how he must have been hemmed in by his mistake, which was marked forevermore in an inescapable shorthand by the sound of a bird’s call. None of that ever occurred to me before reading Quignard’s book.

In the book’s eponymous, seventh treatise, he also makes the painfully astute observation that music was the only art to have been an instrument in the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. The Germans used marches and other songs to reinforce discipline and compliance. Quignard quotes none other than Primo Levi as saying that the music heard in the camps “will be the last thing from the Lager we will forget” because it is “the voice of the Lager.”

Yet as dense and erudite as the book is, “The Hatred of Music” abounds with short, pithy thoughts that cause the reader to wonder why these ideas aren’t routinely bandied about in everyday conversation. In the second treatise, Quignard writes, “To hear is to be touched from afar.” Oh, yes, c’est vrai! A page later, he writes, “Before birth, until the final moment of death, men and women hear without a moment’s respite. There is no sleep for hearing.” Well, now that you mention it. In another section, a fragment reads simply, “Not knowing the name of what haunts us in sound.” Yes, that. These ideas are collected in the chapter called, “It So Happens That Ears Have No Eyelids.”

All of these straightforward yet profound statements build a case for hearing as perhaps the most powerful of the five senses, a hidden motor of activity that can be blamed for all manner of problems and conditions and predilections that travel with us from birth to death. It’s as if he’s peering into our thoughts.
In one especially evocative section, he speaks of the continuity of sound, even within our heads when nothing external could potentially reach our ears. He uses the term “surging hums,” which strike us as we walk, modulating “according to the rhythm of our gait.” What are these “surging hums”? Hymns, he says. Old songs. “Childish and protective refrains. Lullabies and nursery rhymes. Polkas and waltzes. Singalong tunes.” He’s probing an internal soundtrack of which we are often dimly aware even as it’s broadcast inside of our heads.

Indeed, he’s often writing about things we sense but cannot articulate. He’s writing about sound in a way that’s arguably rare for the common reader in America to come upon, including this reviewer, but which nonetheless is germane and perceived on some level by every single person alive. That’s because he’s approaching sound as a primordial force within us, that is common to all of us, whether we routinely read the work of French essayists or not. To wit, he writes, “Nonvisual sounds, forever withdrawn from sight, roam within us. Ancient sounds tormented us. We did not yet see. We did not yet breathe. We did not yet scream. We heard.” The thought is so true and essential that, though it appears only on page 9, one could put the book down, having already grasped something vital about the connection between sound and consciousness.

Yet a reviewer should issue this warning: Abandon all hope—ye who read this book—of traditional structure or tight narrative weave. As the journal Quarterly Conversation has noted about Quignard’s oeuvre, “One is struck by the feeling that they are witnessing someone transcribing his thoughts, pure and fresh as they form in the mind, or to use a fitting mythological connection, Athena springing from the head of Zeus.” Indeed, in the translators’ notes at the end of the book, they say Quignard strives to “make language an endeavor of disorientation,” which often gives his prose a “refined coarseness.”

Some of the sentences in the book are almost prohibitively arcane, including this gem: “There is a fragment by Pacuvius that formulates what interrupts the plurimillennial hammering march.” This sentence is followed first by a sentence in French that is translated only in the footnotes and then by the same thought in Latin, which is untranslated. Which is not to suggest the translators, Amos and Rönnbäck, phoned this job in. On top of writing a comprehensive afterword, they have been careful to insert footnotes throughout the text, even indicating at one point where the popular definition of a word (formidable) deviates from Quignard’s usage in the text. (Oh and, if ever a book needed a team of translators, it’s this one.)

Here and there in the early sections of the text, Quignard signals how sound in the form of music has become his own personal torture device. For example, he writes, without elaboration, “The recent religion of happiness turns my stomach.” Then in the book’s ninth treatise, which is tellingly called “To Disenchant,” he writes by way of explanation that music is now so ubiquitous in modern life that “it has become incessant, aggressing night and day, in the commercial streets of city centers, in shopping centers, in arcades, in departments stores . . . even at the beach . . .” In the translators’ afterword, we learn that in 1994 Quignard suddenly retreated from all of his professional activities—including his senior roles at the Gallimard publishing house and the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theater at Versailles. He resolved only to write in solitude.

One hopes Quignard will find the solitude he needs to write because this reviewer believes he could recount the entire history of literature through the lens of sound. And here’s hoping he does just that.