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.

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag

What purpose does a book serve if its content can be neatly condensed onto, and thereby extracted from, its book jacket? Intentionally or not, author Vivek Shanbhag answers this fundamental question in a surprising way with Ghachar Ghochar.

Translated into English from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, Ghachar Ghochar (2015) is the eighth fictional work published by acclaimed writer Vivek Shanbhag. In its tale of an impoverished Indian family whose lifestyle capsizes after gaining sudden wealth from starting a spice trade company, the novella’s themes touch upon those tackled by such American classics as Death of a Salesman and A Raisin in the Sun.

If its plot is reminiscent of A Raisin in the Sun, its narrator—an unnamed, unassuming young man who kills time by reflecting on day-to-day observations—is reminiscent of The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway. Despite playing no active role in the constant social conflict within which he gets entangled, he finds that his owns world is spinning. So, too, is the coffee he seems to be indefinitely stirring at Coffee House—an old-world café where he seeks comfort in the familiar. The familiar being the old ways of life.

Through the narrator’s flashbacks, readers learn that coffee is not the only thing brewing at Coffee House. A newly rich man with no need to work, it is at this café that he churns through memories, attempting to make sense of his increasingly turbulent domestic affairs by pinpointing the moment they went awry. The narrator recounts how his uncle, the family breadwinner, transformed from washed up salesman to CEO almost overnight. What follows is a disruption of family order that parallels that of larger Indian society during the nation’s recent era of industrialization, feminist enlightenment, and socioeconomic transition.

The flashbacks also tell of old and new generations at war within his family, including battles between his mother and his new wife regarding a woman’s place within the delicate familial dynamic. Feminist undertones fully emerge by story’s end, when the narrator is left sitting alone, wondering if his marriage has permanently collapsed or if his wife will return. Clearly, it is no longer he who is in control of the power struggle that has become of his once happy marriage.

At its heart, Ghachar Ghochar is a book of chaos: the line where modernity and traditional culture clash. Take the case of the narrator’s family gaining unexpected—and ultimately detrimental—prosperity by capitalistic means as they enter the big, bad business world. Here, the old sentiment “be careful what you wish for” does well to describe Ghachar Ghochar’s thematic complexity. For, after careful meditation, the only conclusion the narrator is able to reach is that neither financial prosperity nor feminism immediately translate to social peace; both require hard work to make their unadulterated ideals a lasting success.

All of these flashbacks materialize in the symbolic scene of ants overrunning the narrator’s former home—ants, he observes, that uncharacteristically fall out of line, choosing to march independently rather than in orderly single-file rows. Like the ants, so do the novella’s characters march to the beat of their own drum. With newfound money comes newfound boldness as the younger generations dare to defy expectation by falling outside the lines drawn by the hierarchical conventions of traditional Indian society.

If there is one constant throughout the chaos, it is the narrator’s recurring comments on the difficulty of explaining things—be they events, feelings, actions, or behavioral motives—to people who don’t possess the full contextual background of the circumstance in question. In one scene, the narrator’s wife becomes upset after witnessing her husband kill an ant for (at least to her) no discernible reason. The narrator then laments on the hopelessness of trying to get her to understand his actions without him first explaining their deep-rooted context. He confides to readers: “How was I to explain to her my history with ants? It would make no sense to someone who hadn’t lived through something similar” (p. 76).

And in this way, Vivek Shanbhag masterfully touches upon why we read stories in the first place: books are written because they are the only means we have to thoroughly explain a circumstance by showing audiences the context leading up to that circumstance. In the case of this novella, flashbacks are employed because past and perspective are essential to explaining how and why things are what they are today—be it why the narrator kills ants, or why India is experiencing a socioeconomic reorganization. Context is everything in this story—a story of past, present, and how the two influence the future. It gives words (including the titular “ghachar ghochar,” a made-up phrase whose meaning only exists within the inside joke of the characters who invented it) their very meaning. As Vivek Shanbhag writes in this novella, “Language communicates in terms of what is already known; it chokes up when asked to deal with the entirely unprecedented.” In the end, past, perspective, and context are what book jackets lack in giving a text its meaning.

The Truce by Mario Benedetti
translated from the Spanish by Harry Morales
192 pgs. | pb | 9780141396859 | £8.99 

Reviewed by Arianna Aron

Mario Benedetti (1920-2009), Uruguay’s most beloved writer, was a man who loved to bend the rules. He gave his haikus as many syllables as fit his mood, and wrote a play divided into sections instead of acts. In his country, he was an outspoken supporter of the Frente Amplio, resisting the brutal dictatorship that forced him into a 12-year exile. He was a man who took sides, and took chances. That such a man could invent the intimate diary of a person like Martín Santomé says much for Benedetti’s deep sensitivity to the human condition. The diary is the text for his 1960 novel La Tregua (The Truce).

Martín Santomé is a 49-year-old worn out accountant close to retirement, a widower living with his three grown children. A casual bed fellow once described him as looking like a clerk even when he’s making love. He is so unimaginative that, of all the occupations in the world, what he would choose if he’d be something other than an accountant, is to be a waiter. As he looks back on the 20 years since his wife’s death, he realizes that he hasn’t been happy, but he did right by his children. He was spared “the unyielding look that is reserved for heartless fathers.”

A man of his times, Santomé is upset by his younger son’s homosexuality. He blames himself for Jaime’s “deviance,” and can’t understand why Blanca and Esteban turned out “normal.” But Martín Santomé continues to be the dutiful father, and we appreciate him for that, just as we forgive him for defining women by their body parts and believing that when they’re menstruating they can’t concentrate. Unlike certain contemporary homophobes and misogynists, he has no rancor toward gays and women, and is in fact a person who both tolerates and accepts differences so well that he welcomes a female colleague at work when she is one of three new employees assigned to his department. As with the male workers, he calls her by her family name, which happens to be the surname of the author who wrote a phony Part Two of Don Quixote (a book that made Cervantes very angry because in the counterfeit edition, Don Quixote falls out of love with Dulcinea). Benedetti, the consummate writer, must have seen something compelling there, because soon after Avellaneda comes to work for Santomé, he falls in love with her—with a love that is transformative and enduring.

Martín Santomé had never imagined this romance. For a long time he’d been satisfied with anonymous one-night stands that had nothing in common with the sense of communion he’d felt with Isabel, his deceased wife. With her, he tells his diary, “every one of my impulses mathematically found its own receptive echo. We were made for each other.” The love for Avellaneda, a woman half his age, was a surprise that happened to him, not something he’d gone looking for.

When the accountant first contemplates what it could be like with Avellaneda, what troubles him most is the mismatch between what he sees as her youthful expectations and his future of guaranteed arthritis—the portent of a relationship with barely a temporary patent. In ten years, when he’s pushing 60 and she is 33: will she cheat on him? Leave him for a younger man? As the affair progresses, though, Avellaneda declares her love, explaining to Martín that it’s not for his face, or his years, or his words, or his intentions that she loves him, but because he is a good man. His preoccupation now becomes her future happiness. He broods over whether there will be enough strength and longevity to give her a good life, a concern that becomes sadly ironic as the story unfolds.

Harry Morales, the translator of this intriguing novel, does a fine job of giving Santomé a voice in English. Whether the accountant is speaking of the tedium and frustrations of office work, or the aging lover is fretting over physical and existential issues inherent in May-December romances, or the rejuvenated man is reflecting on his feelings for this “truce” that is occurring in his otherwise dreary life, the diarist’s entries—always a bit reserved—draw us in and make us a part of his world.

Though Martín Santomé’s world is confined to the small middle-class society of Montevideo in mid-twentieth-century Uruguay, his issues with family, career, aging, retirement, and above all, love and loss, resonate beyond borders and time to make his diary a touching and rewarding universal read. Of the ninety books Benedetti published, The Truce stands out for its popularity, with more than a million copies sold, translation into twenty languages, and a 1974 film version by Sergio Renán that was nominated for an Academy Award. In Martín Santomé’s simple urban life there is a depth and authenticity that people everywhere can identify with and appreciate, and now, with Harry Morales’s refreshing new translation, readers of English can enjoy this engaging novel by one of Latin America’s most acclaimed writers.