The title is ironically misappropriated from Leopardi’s Canto XXXII, “Palinode to the Marchese Gino Capponi,” in the J. G. Nichols version. This final post on Italian literature will be un guazzabuglio. More questions than answers. I plan to, as the year goes on, drop in random Italian words that I have looked up on the internet, to add sapore and give l'impressione that I know some Italian, which I do not.
Would it be worthwhile to do something with opera? Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, composers for the popular musical theater, were better known and are arguably greater artists than any of the writers I will be reading. Yet their librettists are obscurities, even the one whose name I know, Arrigo Boito, author of librettos for several of Verdi’s late works. If there a literary approach to the operas, which are, among other things, plays? Do I know what I am doing? Is it worth the effort?
A couple of writers are puzzling to me, too. Gabriele D’Annunzio was for a time a giant, rich and famous and wild, author of a huge number of books in numerous styles and forms. He was, at least in his later life, a fascist loon. He and his followers, for example, seized a Croatian city in 1919 in order to do who knows what – the Italian Regency of Carnaro, with D’Annunzio as Il Duce. “The charter designated ‘music’ to be one of the fundamental principles of the Fiume State,” (from previous link). This sort of thing damages a writer’s reputation, it turns out, but the bad result for me is not that I have anything against reading the works of crazy people with bad ideas – oh no, quite the contrary – but rather that I have no idea which books are thought to be good (and are available in English, and are available to me).
Another fascist, the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, presents a similar problem, but in his case I suspect a little more that his writings have become more interesting as intellectual history than as art. Ford Madox Ford says I should read King Bombance and Mafarka the Futurist, which have better titles than D’Annunzio novels like The Flame of Life and The Triumph of Death.
Does anybody remember me mentioning the series of adventure novels about a Malaysian pirate by Emilio Salgari, “without whom there would be no Italian, French, Spanish, or Latin American Literature” says Carlos Fuentes. An unlikely claim, but how could I not be curious?
A friendly reader has emailed to suggest I try Edmondo De Amici’s Cuore (1886), a hugely popular novel about a schoolboy; Ford Ford likes it, too. Another De Amici novella available in English is titled Love and Gymnastics (1892). Its library catalog classifications are “Women Gymnasts – Fiction” and “Love Stories,” so the title might be accurate. This does not sound promising, but it has a foreword by Italo Calvino!
Also recommended by this thoughtful reader: more Sicilian fiction, including The Viceroys (1894) by Federico De Roberto, a Sicilian epic, and stories by Maria Messina, an adept of Giovanni Verga who specialized in tales about Sicilian women. Verga, De Roberto, Messina, and then Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), which is set during the same period – that could be an interesting chain of books. Cuore and The Viceroys seem to follow that gigantic Nievo novel. There are lots of stories to tell with books.
There is no way I will read all of this, everything I have mentioned over the past few days, not this year and not ever, but I have a lot to play with. Please feel free to give me more, more titles and writers and paths. The ideal solution is that someone else reads Emilio Salgari and King Bombance and so on and writes them up for me. Thanks in advance.
Finally, I have been clear enough, I hope, about what I am not reading, an important limit because as usual I want to invite you to join me on a book if something seems to fit into whatever path you are following, if you just moments ago were thinking “I have been meaning to read Love and Gymnastics!” Let me know; we will find a time; it will all work out somehow.
Friday, January 9, 2015
Sing of the needs / Of this our century; sing our ripe hope. - questions, scraps, oddities, and more books - an Italian hodgepodge
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So many ways to go. I started Cuore this past year but put it aside for a rainy day; I got the impression that the ideal time for me to have read it was long past, but I'll go back to it.
ReplyDeleteIt's striking how many Fascist era Italian writers were Fascists themselves in the beginning, and how many of them later strongly rejected Fascism: Pavese, Gadda, Brancati, Malaparte - just to name a few. Pirandello held on far too long. D'Annunzio obviously went right over the edge.
Heck, I'll volunteer to try Salgari if I can find it. His name has popped up on my radar before.
Smart young guys, just after a terrible war, no surprise that they tangle themselves up in some bad ideas for a while. It was an era of terrible ideas.
ReplyDeletePirandello is a sad example. D'Annunzio is now a comic example.
If a Salgari book were handy, in one of my libraries, I would probably not be able to resist. Actually, one of them has several Salgari novels, but in Italian. Every future Latin American writer, for a couple of generations read, seems to have read Salgari the way every future American writer will turn out to have absorbed Harry Potter.
The Sandokan novels, like Cuore, are books better read when young. Somehow the adventures of a pirate in Malaysia seem less engaging during adulthood.
ReplyDeletePinocchio on the other hand has been the inspiration for hundreds of jokes and for that absolute masterpiece, Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice. Oh where can I find a blue ogress?
Pinocchio is referenced in the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan tetralogy. Lila's first book, written when she's a child, is entitled The Blue Fairy.
ReplyDeleteThere is something going on in those Ferrante novels that people are missing. I haven't read them and don't have a guess about what it is. But it nags at me when I read reviews. Maybe it is just that those are such badly reviewed books.
ReplyDeleteIt is too late for me to read Cuore when young! Sadly, so sadly.
Is That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, by Carlo Emilio Gadda, too 20th century for you?
ReplyDeletePeople assume that Ferrante's books are not wholly fictional because they sense a personal animus at work in them. For example, there's something sadistically mischievous in the fate Ferrante concocts for her brilliant friend (a friend smarter, more brilliant and more beautiful than Elena when they were at school). The brilliant friend ends up working at a sausage factory, waist deep in bloody, brine-y water every day for hours, periodically molested by the bosses and unable to muster up enough energy at the end of her long, long days to be able to read anymore.
ReplyDeleteMaybe Ferrante is the brilliant friend. Maybe the sausages are novels.
ReplyDeleteThe Gadda novel was published int he 1940s, right? Someday, years from now, this blog will have an All-1940s format, novel after novel about the war and its aftermath. Then I'll read Gadda,
I would love to read your analysis of Ferrante's novels. Most reviewers focus mainly on the plot. But the plot of a book is not the book. What matters most is how a writer achieves her effects. But it will take a much better reader than me to untangle how passages like this one (taken from a book that JacquiWine described as ferocious) work, and work brilliantly:
DeleteI myself, feeling weary and obtuse, more and more often fell asleep at ten in the morning and woke barely in time to hurry to pick up the children at school, and so, out of fear that I wouldn’t wake up in time from these sudden sleeps, I began to get them used to coming home by themselves.
On the other hand my sleeping during the day, which before alarmed me as a symptom of illness, now pleased me, I waited for it. Sometimes I was wakened by the faraway sound of the bell. It was the children, I don’t know how long they had been ringing. Once when I opened the door after a long delay, Gianni said to me:
“I thought you were dead.”
In the course of one of these sleep-filled mornings I was wakened suddenly as if by the prick of a needle. I thought it was time for the children, I checked the clock, it was early. I realized that what had pierced me was the sound of the cell phone. I answered angrily, in the peevish voice I now used with everyone. But it was Mario, and I immediately changed my tone. He said that he was calling on the cell phone because something was wrong with the regular phone, that he had tried many times and had heard only hissing sounds, distant conversations of strangers. I was moved by the sound of his voice, by its kindness, by his presence in the world somewhere. The first thing I said to him was:
“You mustn’t think that I put the glass in the pasta on purpose. It was an accident, I had broken a bottle.”
Rohan Maitzen mentions in her Ferrante meta-review just what you say, that no one seems to have any interest in anything remotely formal in Ferrante - structure, imagery, rhetoric, language. Why does no one read her like I read Javier Marías - with distrust? But no, Ferrante is "honest."
DeleteThe passage you quote is very strange! "hissing sounds, distant conversations of strangers." Someone should read the Ferrante books with the assumption that they are dishonest.
That Gadda novel is molto buono if not outright great. 1946, though, so too "modern" for your antiquarian purposes
DeletePractically contemporary.
DeleteI've read some Marinetti, and am not too keen on him, but I've always been curious about "Bombance." I've seen it described as an imitation of Ubu, which I suspect is not the whole story. It's online; maybe I'll give it a shot. It's 299 pages, though, which is a lot of Marinetti.
ReplyDeleteMaybe a book about Marinetti and the Futurists would be in order. What that book might be, I don't know.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed Michael Kirby's book "Futurist Performance," which contains manifestos and scripts by Marinetti and others. The theater is fun: they wrote a lot of radically brief plays: boiling down a five-act tragedy to five lines, for example. Marinetti did one in which you only saw the actors' feet. It's as good a place to start as any, and the scripts are short.
ReplyDeleteI'd never read the Fuentes quote before, but it does make me curious about the Salgari. Some quick research, and it looks like it's easier for me to get a Spanish translation than English from the library! I'd have to go visit a university library halfway across the state to read the "library use only" copies that are available in English--which means it'd be cheaper to just buy a copy. Maybe I'll leave Salgari to others...
ReplyDeleteDoug, thanks - good solution. Focus in the theater, of course.
ReplyDeleteThe Fuentes quote is so funny. What? What? It is not like Salgari in English is so expensive, but I feel as you do, Amanda - lines must be drawn, even if they are obliterated later.
Of course, the last (only) time I made an ILL request at my local library, they went ahead and bought the book.
DeleteGood for the library! ILLs are like customer surveys for libraries.
DeleteI did improve each shining hour by reading the first act of "Bombance." I was curious about Marinetti's early pre-Futurist work. Well, the king is an obese glutton who rules over a starving populace. I found it verbose, heavy-handed, humorless, and trite, with lots of long speeches that don't really say much. I'll persist a bit and see what happens. I can see the Jarry influence, but he certainly didn't have Jarry's verve.
ReplyDeleteI took a look at "Mafarka." It's subtitled "African Novel," and seems to be about a man who fathers a son without using the "stinking vulva." The first chapter is "The Rape of the Negresses." Perhaps someone else can read that one...
I fear you will have trouble making "sweet Food" from Marinetti. You are going above and beyond. There are books to know and books to know about.
ReplyDeleteI may not finish "Bombance." I had to set it aside now and then and read some Flann O'Brien. I like that little play about the feet, though.
ReplyDeleteMarinetti went through some changes. He was a fascist, but disliked Hitler and antisemitism, and tried to persuade Mussolini not to join the Axis. He proclaimed himself a misogynist, but later married and had three daughters. Who knows what went on behind that mustachioed facade?
The pranksters are always hard to pin down. Sometimes they even mean what they say.
ReplyDeleteThe short (short, short) plays sound like the way to go.
In his review of the performance of "Bombance," Ernest La Jeunesse pointed out that it was one thing to read that the king farts and burps, and another to watch him do it. It may have been the same with fascism: fun in a poem, less so in life.
ReplyDelete" fascism: fun in a poem, less so in life."
DeleteAdorno said fascism is what happens when you try to apply aesthetics to politics,
There's an essay by Auden which argues that the qualities of great art- specifically poems- would make an unbearable society and the qualities that make a society worth living in would make disastrous poems.
Roger, I do not believe I was familiar with either the Adorno or Auden, but that is pretty close to why Wuthering Expectations is a politics-free zone. Here I can turn the art and aesthetics on full blast.
DeleteStill true! Marinetti is a precursor of Mel Brooks.
ReplyDelete