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Fifty years ago, an extraordinary work of fiction attempted to explain the second world war in 740 colourful, grim and utterly gripping pages. I’d never heard of the monumental 1974 novel La Storia (History) — nor its author, the Italian novelist and poet Elsa Morante — until a friend from Naples gave me a copy of William Weaver’s English translation this summer. But this forgotten classic, set in Rome between 1941 and 1947 and detailing the horrors of trying to survive conflict, inspired me to read Morante’s work almost obsessively over the past couple of months.
The first woman to win the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award, for her 1957 novel L’isola di Arturo (Arturo’s Island), Morante was a formidable force. The Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg once declared her “the greatest writer of our time”. The reclusive novelist Elena Ferrante, whose pseudonym carries the cadence of a tribute to Morante, wrote of reading her first novel Menzogna e sortilegio (House of Liars), a sweeping saga of three generations of a southern Italian family, when she was 16: “There I discovered what literature can be. That novel multiplied my ambitions, but it also weighed on me, paralysing me.”
Morante was born in Rome in 1912 to a relatively poor Jewish-Sicilian family. At the age of 18 she supported herself by teaching Latin, turning to prostitution in extremis, before forging a career as a journalist and short story writer. She had strong leftist sympathies and a hatred for the dogma of Mussolini’s fascists. In 1938, when Hitler came to Rome to meet Mussolini, Morante prepared a pot of boiling oil, intending to pour it over the two dictators from her kitchen window as they passed by in an open-top car, but she was persuaded to stand down by her lover and fellow-writer Alberto Moravia. She and Moravia were married in 1941 but they were forced to flee Rome two years later, when they were placed on a wanted list for their anti-fascist activities, and because of their Jewish heritage.
By the early 1970s the pair had separated, and Morante began to focus her professional interest on the old ghettos of Rome, taking long walks through the Testaccio and San Lorenzo districts, making copious notes and interviewing those who remembered the war as research for La Storia. Her biographer Lily Tuck recounts that a friend, the photographer Luca Fontana, asked Morante, “What sort of book are you writing?” And Morante responded: “I’m writing a book for the illiterate.”
Morante wanted La Storia to be accessible to every literate Italian, so she insisted that her publishers release it in paperback at an affordable price. “Now, almost an old woman, I felt I couldn’t depart from this life without leaving the others a testimonial memory of the crucial epoch in which I was born,” she explained in an interview. Within the year, the book had sold a record 800,000 copies in Italy, and would continue to be a bestseller.
La Storia tells the story of Ida Ramundo, a Jewish schoolteacher and widow, as she attempts to survive poverty and war — including rape by a German soldier — with her two sons, Nino and Giuseppe (nicknamed Useppe), and a dog named Bella. Ida is timid, “a little, wounded fox that has gone to earth and strains to hear the barking of the pack”, and every chapter of her story is preceded by a crisp, newsreel-like summary of world affairs.
The effect is startling. I stayed up night after night for a week, unable to read anything else or to turn away from Morante’s searing sentences until I had finished History. She writes like a war correspondent, her descriptions sometimes clinical — “Rome stank, Italy stank, and the living stank worse than a corpse” — and sometimes lyrical. The family dog responds to air-raids with his own howls of delight, his tail wagging, “immediately ready, as if at the transcendental announcement of a prime festivity”.
In 1974, the year that La Storia was published in Italy, Paul Hoffman wrote in the New York Times: “For the first time since anyone can remember, people in railroad compartments and espresso bars discuss a book — the Morante novel — rather than the soccer championship or the latest scandal. The critics write endlessly about La Storia and the reasons for the exceptional stir it is causing.” But a decade or so after Morante’s death in 1985, her renown was already starting to wane.
Perhaps La Storia was too sprawling and too classically plotted to suit contemporary tastes. Or perhaps Morante, like Clarice Lispector, Lucia Berlin and many other women writers, is fated to go through cycles of oblivion and revival. But half a century after the publication of La Storia, as genocide and massacres continue to shake the world, Morante’s work is once again piercingly relevant. Her empathy extended to all of the Ida Ramundos caught up in the grim web of suffering; her fury was directed at everyone who took part in or refused to stop war.
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