On 2009-12-13 Linda Linguvic, New York City wrote: Elsa Morante, the author, lived though WWII in Italy. She has a real understanding of what that was like and she shares this with her readers in quite a profound way. I was moved and saddened. But I just kept reading, and by the end of the book I had developed a deep understanding of the horror of war as it affected the ordinary people.
Ida, a widowed schoolteacher in her thirties, is raped by a young German soldier and as a result gives birth to her second son, Useppe. This is a secret at first but when her 15-year old older son, Nino, discovers this he is delighted with his little brother. Later, Ida´s home is destroyed by bombs and she flees to the countryside with her baby and Nino goes off on his own and later appears sporadically. Ida does the best she can to feed and shelter her young son but lives with a special kind of fear because she is one-fourth Jewish and Jews are being deported. Life is difficult; she shares a single room with a dozen other people, food is almost nonexistent and feeding her young son is her only priority. It was hard for me to realize that people actually lived like this.
Throughout the book Nino comes and goes, always adoring his younger brother and disrespecting his mother. He is a passionate young man with a strong appetite for adventure and there is always an atmosphere of danger around his activities. The writer details all of this starkly, and I was drawn into the story and the despair. Sometime she inserts a page or two of basic historical facts about what was going on in the world which brings the whole story into context.
The book spans a few years after the war with returning veterans telling horror stories, little Useppe being ill, and the insane ravings of a companion of Nino who has been mentally damaged by the war. She also introduces a new character, a dog named Bella who becomes Useppe´s companion and who she endows with a human´s ability to think and describe what is going on around her.
I read every word of this long 738-page book. The ending was sad. I expected that. I was deeply moved. It was a good book.
. And summed up by saying I was moved and saddened, but I just kept reading.. Currently History: A Novel has an overall rating of 10 over 10.
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William Weaver claimed History was written nearly thirty years after Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia spent a year in hiding among remote farming villages in the mountains south of Rome. There she witnessed the full impact of the war and first formed the ambition to write an account of what history - the great political events driven by men of power, wealth, and ambition - does when it reaches the realm of ordinary people struggling for life and bread.The central character in this powerful and unforgiving novel is Ida Mancuso, a schoolteacher whose husband has died and whose feckless teenage son treats the war as his playground. A German soldier on his way to North Africa rapes her, falls in love with her, and leaves her pregnant with a boy whose survival becomes Ida´s passion. Around these two other characters come and go, each caught up by the war which is like a river in flood. We catch glimpses of bombing raids, street crimes, a cattle car from which human cries emerge, an Italian soldier succumbing to frostbite on the Russian front, the dumb endurance of peasants who have lived their whole lives with nothing and now must get by with less than nothing. ´One of the few novels in any language that renders the full horror of Hitler´s war, the war that never gets into the books . . .´-- Alfred Kazan, Esquire´A storyteller who spellbinds.´-- Stephen Spender, The New York Review of Books´A marvel of a novel . . . all the pleasures that fiction can offer.´-- Doris Grumbach, Saturday Review
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