HISTORY: A NOVEL

by Elsa Morante ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1977

Some of the dark power of the Italian neo-realist films that took audiences by storm after World War II is to be found in this novel, prodigious in length and spirit. The heroine is a widowed school teacher, awed by authority and not too bright, who is raped almost accidentally in Rome in 1941 by a drunken German soldier. She bears his son, whom she accepts as wholeheartedly as she does her legitimate son, a restless teenager who flirts with Fascism and then, in his hunger for action, joins the Communist-led resistance. The mother is half-Jewish, although baptized a Christian, and her puzzled fear of the racial laws promulgated to ape Hitler by Mussolini (will her sons count as Jews?) makes her wartime sufferings even more dreadful. Bombed out, she finds refuge with her new-born in slum barracks from which she emerges daily in a more and more difficult search for food. Her baby is filled with love and a precocious intelligence, despite the horrors he witnesses and the attacks of epilepsy that begin to overwhelm him. Morante continually contrasts his innocence and his mother's dedicated solicitude with the cruelties of power that history reveals. She is truly Italian in her celebration of maternity, even in the dog Bella who watches over the little boy. Among the author's strengths is her ability to show the life of ordinary Romans with convincing fidelity. She also informs her work with a pessimistic vision that makes her long book a single aesthetic statement, as hard to argue with as a sob or a moan.

Pub Date: April 1, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1977

Categories: FICTION