Cesare Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires
The locals certainly hope so: he could marry! He could buy a farm! But really he just wants to look at the old places and see some old acquaintances. Maybe the person he most wants to see is Nuto, and he does; Nuto came from a better set-up family, and is now, by the standards of rural post-war Italy, well-off. The 'Eel' looked up to the older Nuto before he left. Nuto worked with the Communist resistance during the war, and retains his Communist sympathies; that doesn't earn him any friends in rural Piedmont in 1950.
The novella is rather slow-burning--surprising in a novella?--and it takes a while before we get to the dramatic plot elements, which happened during the war and are reported by Nuto. But it's mostly an atmospheric work, I thought. I was most touched by the Eel's relationship to young Cinto, a near orphan, whom the Eel sees in himself at that age.
The moon and the bonfires are representative of local superstition:
"What is this valley for a family that comes from the sea, who nothing about the moon and the bonfires?"
I was amused that the Eel lived near El Cerrito in the East Bay ("the Cerrito road") when he was in California, where I also lived in the first half of the 90s.
Pavese never went to America, and instead was in internal exile during the Fascist era, but was known for his translations from American literature (Moby-Dick, Gertrude Stein). He committed suicide shortly after this novella came out in 1950.
152p, plus an introduction by Mark Rudman, translated by R. W. Flint
Machado de Assis' The Alienist
"Dr. Simão Bacamarte, a son of the gentry, and the greatest doctor in Brazil, Portugal, and the Spains," has returned to Brazil. "'Science,' he said to His Majesty, 'is my sole employment; Itaguaí is my universe.'" There's no keeping him in Lisbon.
The story is serialized in a Rio de Janeiro newspaper from October of 1881 to March of 1882. But the events, we're told, took place 'long ago.'
Bacamarte is interested in a scientific study of insanity. (Alienist is a nineteenth century term what we would call a psychologist.) He convinces the town to allow him to set up an insane asylum. Well-to-do patients will be paid for by their families; the indigent will be treated at a low cost borne by the city. Bacamarte can make discoveries. Such a great and dignified scientist! The city is thrilled at first.
But Bacamarte starts finding a lot of insanity. A lot. He is accused of doing it for the money; he repudiates the payments and does his work pro bono. A rebellion is started by a barber, which gets a groundswell of support, but not quite enough, and rebellion is a form of insanity, isn't it?
But Bacamarte is sincere in his studies, and he eventually realizes that if everybody's insane, then nobody is. What to do? He veers in different directions, finally coming to what might have been the only sensible solution all along. (Think Chekhov's 'Ward No. 6'). But while Chekhov can be funny, there's a real zaniness in Machado de Assis not present in Chekhov. (And anyway this story is a decade earlier than Chekhov's.)
Is this a political allegory? I dunno. Probably. One chapter in my translation is called 'The Terror'. Funny and thought-provoking.
90p. in my Pushkin Press edition, with other stories. Translated in 2022 by Daniel Hahn. Marcie at Buried in Print also read it this month but in a different translation.
I finished both of these a week or two ago, but I suddenly realized I'd better get going if I was going to squeeze them in for Novellas in November this year. Thanks to our hosts!
I haven't read either of these. (Haven't even heard of the first tbh.) You do find some interesting books. :D
ReplyDeleteHa, well...I do tend to look at anything if it's been reissued by New York Review Books. I've liked most of what I've read by them.
DeleteI'm gratified that you too found the Pavese slow. I got about halfway through it in Italian, then decided I didn't have time for a novel with no story, and put it down. It sounds like I would eventually have run into something like a story. I had in fact already been thinking of returning to it when I finish my current Italian novel in a couple of days, Piccolo mondo antico, by one Fogazzaro, a novel that I gather is hardly known outside of Italy.
ReplyDeleteOh, I see that the system has failed to connect me with my account, perhaps because it has died of disuse. I'm Phillip, that Torontonian novelist and sanskritist who lives in Pune, India.
DeleteI don't know that I would have finished it in Italian myself. The Other Reader--who's reading more Italian than me these days--started it and didn't make it through. I also gather there's a fair amount of dialect making it a tougher read.
DeleteIn the end I liked it OK, but not as much as I thought I might.
I've heard of Fogazzaro, but read nothing.
Hope all's well with you. That next novel?
I don't remember the dialect. I recall finding it linguistically straighforward and often lovely. Now Piccolo mondo antico has dialect, a lot, in the dialogue, but not so much that I lose my way by just scanning it. It's the dialect of the Lake Como region, and as Italian dialects go, it's one of the less lucid ones for me.
DeleteI finished a novel in June, this one inspired by my time in Belleville and Belleville's most famous daughter Avril Lavigne. I doubt if I'll ever be published again, though.
DeleteI've been reading Eugenio Montale's poetry lately for my Italian, but I should read a couple of novels again--we're thinking about Italy in the spring & I should try to brush up.
DeleteTough market these days, it's a pity, though. Good luck with it., hopefully something will come through.
Thanks for the links to Victoria's pieces. They look promising.
I'm planing to fly to Rome as early as January, it'll be my first time in Italy since two thousand six, just before my marriage. I'll be keeping it simple, staying in some hostel and just walking the streets for a couple of weeks, looking and listening. We'll go back together later. Of Italian poetry, I've read the whole Commedia twice, and Leopardi's Canti. I got a few stanzas into Orlando Furioso, and found it was not as difficult as I had expected, so I may go back to it, but generally I read fiction: since I won't use a dictionary, I depend heavily on narrative context, so lyric poetry is much more work.
DeleteIn a foreign language I'm more likely to read poetry it seems. I've likely already got the dictionary out. Ancient Greek seems like about the main language without a dictionary in hand. I haven't tried Orlando Furioso in Italian, but I do like in translation. I should give that one a go myself.
DeleteThanks for the links to Victoria's pieces. I especially liked the one cummings & his translation of Horace. When I read that one in high school (later 70s) we didn't call it fascist, but we were already trying to figure out how to read it ironically (and failing).
That's a pretty good language not to need a dictionary for!
DeleteHmm. Maybe. One of the James Bond novels, he says, all those years of Latin and Greek, and I still can't order a cup of coffee in either Athens or Rome.
DeleteThere's words for weaving and pieces of armour that I understand better in Greek than I do in English. My HS Greek textbook had a picture of a loom with all the parts named in Homeric Greek.
A couple of recent posts by my friend Victoria Moul that might interest:
ReplyDeleteEzra Pound and Homer's Latin
https://vamoul.substack.com/p/ezra-pound-and-homers-latin
EE Cummings and Horace the Fascist
https://vamoul.substack.com/p/love-is-a-deeper-season-e-e-cummings
That's a pretty good language not to need a dictionary for!
ReplyDeleteHahn is quite a reputable translator; I wonder how his version would have compared to the one I read. Like you, I wondered, at times, if the story had another layer (or if certain visible layers were more important than others, like the question of definitions used to justify decisions but then overturned and opposite definitions adopted just as quickly/brutally). But even without being sure (either way) of that, I still enjoyed the story. Particularly the effects on their marriage!
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've ever read anything else translated by Hahn, though I'd heard of him before. I thought the translation was quite solid. No, I think any ambiguity/uncertainty on my part is there by design on the part of Machado.
DeleteThe results of the doctor's mad thoroughness--monomania--is all perfectly reasonable, crazy, and at times funny, at times scary, too.