The New Italian Novel Edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile

Differentia: Review of Italian Thought Number 8 Combined Issue 8-9 Spring/Autumn Article 50 1999 The New Italian Novel edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile Robert Dombroski Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia Recommended Citation Dombroski, Robert (1999) "The New Italian Novel edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile," Differentia: Review of Italian Thought: Vol. 8 , Article 50. Available at: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia/vol8/iss1/50 This document is brought to you for free and open access by Academic Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Differentia: Review of Italian Thought by an authorized editor of Academic Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. reviews 391 issues of Judaism and gender raised least, a discrete occasion for reflecting in the works of Lombroso and Serao, on some aspect of alienated human though is never completely success existence. Italian literary culture once ful. enjoyed relative autonomy; it existed The discourses raised by both in a space roped off from society and Lombroso and Serao which address designated as a refuge from commer crucial concerns of the late nine cialization and ideological violence. teenth-century, such as the place and Then one could read the history of identity of women and Jews in soci modem Italy in novels that not only ety and the role of science to mediate spoke to the development of civic pressing social issues, have a contem consciousness but also programmed porary relevance. Moreover, the mind of the reader to a totalizing Harrowitz's work is an important logic. Each fiction answered in some addition to the increasing number of way all the questions that could be studies which trace a current of anti asked about life. Writing was indeed Semitism in Italian culture. By under a serious matter, the only truly 'seri lining the relationship between ous" and "authentic" activity in a beliefs about people and practices world devoted to material progress. marked as different, as well as the The task of writing novels was noth logic of the erasure of difference, ing less than to represent society to Harrowitz's study rings with a con itself. temporary relevance as we confront It is hard to pinpoint when the recent recycled racist and misogynist novel in Italy ceased being a vehicle discourses culminating in The Bell of ideological commitment. Nor is it Curve. certain that all current writing is in fact post-ideological. Vassalli, CAROLE C. GALLUCCI Consolo and Pazzi are names that Florence, Italy immediately come to mind as proof that commitment (whether on the left or the right) is not a thing of the past. But what these authors lack with respect to such writers as Vittorini, The New Italian Novel Pasolini or Volponi is a sense of the Edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and contradiction between culture and Lino Pertile. the secular market system. They Edinburgh: Edinburgh University share no common purpose in this Press, 1994. regard, no rational project designed to counter the absence and privation What best characterizes the possi they experience in life. In their world, bilities of fiction today in Italy is the "culture" has passed completely over coming into being of a narrative com to the other side to become a part of munity distinct from the groups of society's business. literary intellectuals for whom in the Another way of looking at this post-war period the novel was essen change in context is to view the cul tially a vehicle for social reform or, at tural field as having undergone such 392 DIFFERENT/A an expansion as to embrace every thetic experience. His lucid introduc thing, including politics and eco tion provides a comprehensive back nomics. This universali zation of cul ground to the study of any one, or all, ture, another sign of its of the writers represented, while at disappearance as a semi-autonomous the same time conveying the aware realm, has fostered the creation of a ness that a volume of this kind can different kind of space, removed only at best be provisional, given that from the fusion of society and cul its subject matter is still in the process ture: a retreat distinct from everyday of being defined. life where the literary intellectual can The fifteen writers selected appear engage in a new form of autonomy, alphabetically in essays written most one achieved through an integral ly by Italianists working in the UK. association with the literary product The essays are largely descriptive, itself. In contrast to the neorealism of their general purpose being to pro the fifties and the experimentalism of vide comprehensive introductions, the following decade, for which the and are intended primarily for class literary text was a means of forcing room use. But this does not prevent the reader to think about the relations the authors from approaching their of culture and society, the literature subjects with mature critical insight. of the seventies and eighties believes On the whole, the volume offers a in itself as an autonomous conceptual judicious balance between descrip field, endowed with its own separate tion and interpretation. The essays by language, whose properties are so Peter Hainsworth on Gesualdo unique as to ensure its existence as an Bufalino, Joseph Farrell on Vincenzo independent object. Consolo and Zygmunt Baranski on The New Italian Novel, edited by Sebastiano Vassalli are particularly Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino compelling in their exposition of the Pertile, sustains the arduous burden narrative structures that make the of presenting and explaining this new work of their subjects so unique. Italian narrative order, one that has Chapters on the five women authors developed in a world characteristical included in the volume (Shirley W. ly without foundations . Rarely has a Vinall on Francesca Duranti, Sharon book been so timely, for in spite of Wood on Rosetta Loy, Elvio Guagnini some qualitative differences among on Giuliana Morandini, Jonathan its components, it illustrates well the Usher on Fabrizia Ramondino and way in which the Italian novel pre Ann Hallamore Caesar on Francesca sents itself in our time . The titles of Sanvitale) explore the underlying the essays united in this volume questions of female identity merge in the general sense that their addressed by the novels, while offer objects of study are all in some way ing succinct plot summaries and concerned with anxieties related to cogent examples of literary thematics the author's experience of mortality: and style. The work of Aldo Busi is inconstancy, superficiality, disorienta elegantly surveyed by Massimo tion and play. Lino Pertile prepares Bacigalupo, while Robert Lumley, us well for the call to this new aes- Martin McLaughlin and Anna Dolfi reviews 393 help the reader grasp the originality his book it is perhaps the depthless of Gianni Celati, Andrea De Carlo ness of their prose; their fictions all and Daniele Del Giudice, writers who seem to register and interrogate the in different ways have enlarged the surface of reality. The meaning, narrative perspective created by essence or utopia, the modern novel Calvino into distinctly postmodern was seeking (but never could attain) variants. Antonio Tabucchi and is perceived as either not being with Roberto Pazzi, writers who have per in their grasp or as a distraction that haps made the greatest impact on prevents them from focusing on the current narrative practices, are com ambiguities of the here and now. petently examined by Anna Laura There is also in all of these writers a Lepschy and Philip Cooke respective profound sense of the "variants of ly. Diego Zancani helps close out the human consciousness, the different volume with a sensitive assessment voices of which the world is made" of the late Pier Vittorio Tondelli. and, finally, a continual acknowl It would be of course wrong to edgement of the institution of litera assign the authors represented in this ture, within whose boundaries the volume to a kind of postmodern con self is constructed. fraternity, distinguishable from earli The New Italian Novel offers a vast er, "modernist" associations by virtue assortment of material for fashioning of some thematic dominant. It should a typology of the contemporary also be obvious that the local cul Italian novel that could be based on tures, with which a number of the the new techniques employed in re authors still identify and which defy writing older forms of narrative any institutionalized collectivization, prose. For this reason, the book con are themselves enclaves of old world stitutes an invaluable starting point productivity. These worlds reappear from which many interesting paths in many of the new fictions aestheti can be taken. cally transfigured (think, for exam ple, of the Cefalu of Consolo' s II sor ROBERT DOMBROSKI riso dell'ignoto antico marinaio) into a CUNY Graduate Center, New York historical "moment" existing within an authorial perspective profoundly influenced by consumer society and the economy of international trusts. But unlike the archaic culture in Antonio Gramsci: Beyond which writers like Pavese and Marxism and Vittorini sought authenticity and Postmodern ism redemption, the old worlds of the By Renate Holub. new novels offer no means of sur London: Routledge, 1992. vival; no Utopian alternative to the perceived horrors of modernity. In a letter to Tatiana Schucht, If there is anything, beside their Antonio Gramsci wrote about accom common idiom, that unites such plishing something 'fiir ewig' (forev diverse writers as those discussed in er) while in prison. 1 Gramsci states: .

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