“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This ...
Tag: Italy
What Were the Women of “Thrones”?
There’s something attractive about watching Game of Thrones’ labyrinthine drama unfold in a world where stone, wood, and steel reign supreme. Amid ...
“Who Knows If They Found Any Burial At All?”
In the novels and short stories about Ferrara that he published in the 1950s and ’60s, Giorgio Bassani uncovered the Fascist side of his hometown that many ...
The Metamorphoses of Alberto Savinio
“Child prodigies usually have the fate of soap bubbles,” wrote Giorgio de Chirico in 1952, before observing that in the case of his recently deceased younger brother ...
Legacies of Italian Marxism
“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” What was left of this seemingly ominous prospect a century after the publication of Karl Marx and ...
Somalia and Italy across a Century
The United Nations Refugee Agency has calculated that, by the end of 2016, there were almost 68 million “persons of concern” (refugees, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable groups) living on this ...
Wild States of Being
A lacquered blue cube and a cat named Labes: these nonhuman characters shed unforgiving light on human frailty in the wrenching new novel by Italian writer Domenico Starnone, Ties, scrupulously ...
Ferrante’s Secret Mirror
Last fall’s noisy dispute around Elena Ferrante’s biographical identity ignited a wealth of contrasting yet instructive reactions. Whether troubled or newly admiring or indifferent to the apparent ...
The Ferrante Paradox
Reading Frantumaglia, the new collection of letters, interviews, and occasional prose from Elena Ferrante, I was struck by how often the author opened her correspondence with an apology. “I apologize ...
From Berlusconismo to Trumpismo
With America’s national neuroses thrust into collective view by the ongoing election season, the lure of long-form TV is more powerful than ever. Fortunately for the soul that abhors primary numbers ...
Roberto Calasso and the Irresistible Art of the Publisher
1 | Advice In judging Roberto Calasso’s brief, elegant book The Art of the Publisher, it might help to list the practical advice Calasso has to offer after 50 years in the trade. Or, if we have ...
Caravaggio’s Hair
Human hair, as Álvaro Enrigue points out in Sudden Death, is the only part of the human body that does not rot. It accordingly plays a starring role in the novel, which is as interested in the ...
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Modernist Turn
Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole announces the birth of a modernist. Written in hard-won Italian and reverberating with the energy of early 20th-century literary experiment, In altre parole describes ...
Paying Attention Like Primo Levi: An Interview with Ann Goldstein
Stuart Woolf, a British historian and the first English-language translator of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man, wrote that Levi’s “interest in the translation of his books was ...
Hard Labor: On the Complete Works of Primo Levi
Turin, the provincial capital of Piedmont in northwestern Italy, sometime in the mid-1950s. In a comfortable apartment block on Corso Re Umberto, a 19th-century boulevard running southwest of the ...
Ferrante, in History
What happens when the most ambitious rethinking of the politics of realism in recent memory can’t be attached to a face? (Can they give the Nobel Prize to a pseudonym?) Now that the Neapolitan ...
Chronicle of a Soul: Roberto Saviano
“If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” The old adage might be a fit translation of what many Italians thought when Roberto Saviano received death threats from the Camorra (the Neapolitan ...
How Fascism Pushed Women out of the Frame
Italians today tend to draw a firm line between the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime that ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 to 1943 and the Italian Republic that emerged in its wake. The ...
Past and Future Both Color the Present
How to Be Both, the sixth novel by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, is an astounding work of art, so exquisite in its composition that reading it feels like staring into a Decadent painting, bound and ...
To Translate Is to Betray: On the Elena Ferrante Phenomenon in Italy and the US
The stunning fortunes of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels in the United States have only recently begun to affect their reception in the author’s native country, giving rise to competing theories ...
