A Great Creative Act

...After the child, Giuseppe (or Useppe, as he comes to be called), is born, she hides him in the house...

...The two were school teachers, and the sickly, obedient Ida, having followed in their footsteps, is now teaching in a Rome elementary school...

...It would take much more space than I have here to do justice to the many characters, incidents and backgrounds of the plot...

...The novel is designed contra-puntally...

...Moreover, the work is written in a direct, unliterary style that adheres to the rhythm and mood of each event and situation...

...his friend David Segre dies of a drug overdose (Morante's account of the causes and terrors of addiction is among the best in contemporary fiction...

...translator, "Simone Weil: A Life" Elsa Morante has given us one of the finest, most profound novels in recent literature...

...I have merely bared the bones of one of the great creative acts of our century...

...I should, however, note the incredible scene of Ida wandering to the railroad station and seeing the Roman Jews shut up in the cattle cars by the Nazis in preparation for their journey to the concentration camp...

...People in it suffer something beside the pangs of paranoia, and actually die when they are hit by bullets...

...In Italy History was a run-away best-seller...

...Those who found Gravity's Rainbow an accurate report of World War II would merely be upset by History...

...The rape is representative of the entire book's approach to violence: Poor Gun-ther, the soldier, bewildered and lonely, really feels tenderness for this strange woman...

...But alongside History and its ravages there exists the human community with its impulses toward free physical expression, its appreciation of nature and animals (the sacred role of animals in our lives has never been so beautifully expressed), and its respect for the undivided human consciousness...

...She had been married to a crude, less inspired replica of her father, who like her parents died before the novel opens, leaving her with a child, Nino...

...She is timorous, conventional, tortured since childhood by fears, nightmares and even a few fainting spells that were in fact epileptic fits...

...At the benumbed end of the War, Ida returns to teaching and Useppe starts attending school...

...He is one of History's beneficent presences?handsome, full of energy and love and demands on life, a typical Roman youngster right down to his espousal of Fascism...

...Plain though it may appear at first, as the novel proceeds the style shows itself capable of expressing the most delicate and wry nuances...

...The last creates all love and beauty and is constantly being brutalized by the managers of History, the owners of the Power House...

...That it is doing much less well in the United States may be attributable to our more jaded, tense condition...

...And Useppe is a magnificent gift, a child of sheer delight and wonder who is exalted and entranced by all of life's spectacles...

...and the long, delightfully humorous description of the promiscuous, gay life of Ida's small band in a hut occupied by a weirdly wonderful collection of bombed-out strays...

...I must confess that I did too...

...We cry because Morante has made her main characters so real and charming that we dread the terrible events we know will overtake and crush them...

...On the other, we have the grim, drab, violent progress of the War as it strikes at the Roman community...

...Everyone should read History, for everyone will be instructed and delighted by it...

...In the Italy of the early 1940s, her fears and her death wish mesh with reality: Because the Nazis are hunting for people of Jewish birth, she becomes obsessed with her culpable half-Jewishness...

...His relations to animals, nature and the people he cares about are so brilliantly presented that what in any other writer might seem sentimental strikes us here as an immense creative achievement...

...Most of the action unfolds on the small stage of Rome during the War and its immediate aftermath (1941-47), and within the even smaller confines of a family that, after all of its terrible and joyous vicissitudes, is the victim of History's violence and depredation...

...Morante clearly belongs to the second group—with her long, flowing inspiration, the wonderful capaciousness she imparts, and her unfailing sense of a tale's inevitability that is the mark of a great story-teller...

...Ginsburg added—and this is no small matter for a book that never offends our modern sense of complexity and irony—that she cried over many of its pages...

...the episode where Blitz, a dog Nino picked up, is killed in the bombing of the family's house...

...Indeed, he is the hero of this novel, the expression of pure, innocent love and love of life, a kind of Roman Prince Myshkin who dies before he reaches the age of seven but convinces us completely of his worth, charm and openness...

...At this, Ida collapses into the mute, sorrowing, classic posture of the Pietd, which indeed she has always been...

...On the contrary, she believes that History is an element we all live in, that its effect on us is indirect and all-pervasive, and that our victimization by it is cruel and casual, not unlike a man getting run over by a street car...

...One day when she is out, Nino discovers the infant and is absolutely entranced by his younger brother, whom he regards as a magnificent gift...

...On the one hand, we have the miraculous group consisting of Ida, her two sons and the various animals and people that attach themselves to this little island of warmth and affection...

...Clever, streetwise kid that he is, he avoids looking into the matter more closely...

...Useppe is a potentially great poet, and the reader knows that had he lived he would have done all he had promised...

...people who had never cracked a book ran out to buy it...

...Ida is just the opposite...

...The story then winds down in a series of deaths: Nino gets killed by the police while smuggling arms...

...I can understand exactly what the Italian writer Natalia Ginsburg meant when she said she not only considers History on a par with The Brothers Kara-mazov but that it marked a turning point in her emotional and intellectual life...

...Thus the author unquestionably has a message to deliver—against power and for freedom in every sphere of life: education, sex, child rearing, factory work...

...Max Beerbohm once said that there are writers who write from a tank and writers who write from a stream...

...Ida is the daughter of a Christian father, a kind, rough man who somewhere picked up the anarchist ideas he spent his life grumbling about with his mates in a poor wine shop, and of a rather refined mother of Jewish birth who both bedeviled and dazzled her husband by her slightly superior social status and her raging neurotic fits...

...A drunken young German soldier on his way to Africa (which he never reaches, since he is killed when his transport plane is shot down) meets by chance a 37-year-old woman, Ida Ramundo, steers the frightened creature to her apartment, and rapes her...

...and when this finally happens, tears are the sole release from the deep emotions that have been so powerfully evoked in us...

...Indeed, one lives in a kind of enchanted misery waiting for History to reach down and destroy these fragile, precious existences...

...In the telling and interweaving of these two tales, both of them filled with irony, with pathos and with tragedy, History becomes a penetrating modern fable...

...His attempts at being a good pupil constitute an extremely sharp satire on modern education when confronted by genius...

...and Useppe dies in an epileptic fit brought on by his pain at the loss of all his beloved friends...

...Discovering that her rape has resulted in conception, she goes to the Roman ghetto in search of a clandestine midwife so that her neighbors will not learn of her misdeed...

...hence his violence is understandable, even forgivable, unlike the faceless violence of History...

...Morante's idea of how history affects her characters is not the usual, liberal and deterministic view underlying most realistic novels (X is a drunkard or a criminal because his father was a brute, his mother a dishrag...

...The story begins in 1941 in Rome...

...Remarkably, though, because of its exciting narrative and vivid characterizations, this book can be enjoyed by the common reader...

...Apparently Morante decided that returning to the free, uncramped style of the best 19th-century novels was the only way to show how the World War II years in Europe tragically affected simple, innocent people...