DON'T SHED YOUR TEARS FOR ANYONE WHO LIVES ON THESE STREETS

The sins of the fathers are visited on the children in this pensive multigenerational novel.

Argentinian writer Pron, who now lives in Madrid, travels east to Italy to locate his newest story. It opens in 1978, the era of the Red Brigades, but immediately looks back to the end of World War II, with a one-time fascist writer recalling the death of a comrade: “When we found Luca Borrello’s corpse, his eyes were open and he was looking up at the sky, as if a moment earlier Borrello too had been appreciating that it was a splendid day.” Borrello had been taking part in a conference of fascist writers even as Mussolini’s Nazi-backed Republic of Salò was collapsing—says another participant, “We wanted new ruins we could dedicate our poems to”—and he was hiding a secret: He'd been sheltering a member of the resistance from roving bands of SS troops. A generation later, the son of the rescued fighter seeks to comprehend the attraction of fascism by interviewing survivors of that literary generation, a story whose denouement reaches into the present. Pron reveals each detail deliberately, letting the mystery build, and he populates his pages with real historical figures and events ranging from the birth of futurism at yet another writers conference to the killing of the conservative politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. His story is part suspense novel, one that explores several puzzles: Why would Borrello have saved a putative enemy, and who killed him in turn? What happened to the texts of a poet who enlisted in Mussolini’s army, and how did he die? It is also part historical investigation, reminiscent of the recent work of the Spanish writer Javier Cercas in its insistence on getting at hidden truths.

A skillfully constructed exploration of past events that many Italians would just as soon forget.