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adam_mcphee 's review for:
A Private Affair
by Beppe Fenoglio
This was magnificent!
Ostensibly this is about Italian partisans in WW2, but really it's an epic. It's concerned with all the things an epic is concerned with: whether to obey the temple sanctuary or violate it, whether the right of guest-friendship is observed or denied, whether to kill the defeated enemy or take him hostage to collect a ransom. Really it's about the way war modulates our behaviour to the enemy, whether we acknowledge their innate humanity or deny it. There's even a divine mist that separates our heroes to kick off the story, and you can tie the plot to the tradition of the night raid.
I picked up this book because I saw a blurb from Italo Calvino comparing it to Ariosto, and I think he's right. The love story that kicks off Milton's journey is, I think, a riff on the love story in Orlando's war against the Lombards in the Alps in the third of Ariosto's five cantos. Maybe that's a stretch. Because here, the story is that Milton loves the distant Fulvia, but discovers from her housekeeper that Fulvia may have loved his best friend Giorgio. Milton wants to confront Giorgio, but Giorgio is taken prisoner by the fascists. So Milton sets off to find a fascist prisoner to exchange for Giorgio. First he asks his friends in the red militias, but they shoot their prisoners quick, so he has to capture one on his own. That's not what happens in Ariosto, but I kept thinking about it anyway. Maybe because they're both operating in such hilly terrain; Ariosto in the alps and Fenoglio in the Langhe. I don't know.
The one complaint I have about this novel is that it was sometimes hard to picture the setting. There's all these hills and ravines and what not, and you always have a sense of what's happening in the moment, but then the next sentence makes you second guess your previous mental imagery. I don't know. Maybe I've grown too accustomed to the flat lands of the Canadian prairies.
Ostensibly this is about Italian partisans in WW2, but really it's an epic. It's concerned with all the things an epic is concerned with: whether to obey the temple sanctuary or violate it, whether the right of guest-friendship is observed or denied, whether to kill the defeated enemy or take him hostage to collect a ransom. Really it's about the way war modulates our behaviour to the enemy, whether we acknowledge their innate humanity or deny it. There's even a divine mist that separates our heroes to kick off the story, and you can tie the plot to the tradition of the night raid.
I picked up this book because I saw a blurb from Italo Calvino comparing it to Ariosto, and I think he's right. The love story that kicks off Milton's journey is, I think, a riff on the love story in Orlando's war against the Lombards in the Alps in the third of Ariosto's five cantos. Maybe that's a stretch. Because here, the story is that Milton loves the distant Fulvia, but discovers from her housekeeper that Fulvia may have loved his best friend Giorgio. Milton wants to confront Giorgio, but Giorgio is taken prisoner by the fascists. So Milton sets off to find a fascist prisoner to exchange for Giorgio. First he asks his friends in the red militias, but they shoot their prisoners quick, so he has to capture one on his own. That's not what happens in Ariosto, but I kept thinking about it anyway. Maybe because they're both operating in such hilly terrain; Ariosto in the alps and Fenoglio in the Langhe. I don't know.
The one complaint I have about this novel is that it was sometimes hard to picture the setting. There's all these hills and ravines and what not, and you always have a sense of what's happening in the moment, but then the next sentence makes you second guess your previous mental imagery. I don't know. Maybe I've grown too accustomed to the flat lands of the Canadian prairies.