Greed as a Grand Passion
CANTARELLA, HELENE
Greed as a Grand Passion IPPOLITA By Alberto Denti di Pirajno Doubleday. 312 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by HELENE CANTARELLA Contributor, "A tlantic," New York "Times Book Review" A spate of...
...Fate seconds her designs: Konrad dies of heart seizure a few hours after seducing a village girl who, in her turn, dies while giving birth to his son...
...and both take place on the protracted eve of historic events that culminate in the unification of Italy...
...Ippolita's rapaciousness, however, is not the mean, penny-pinching miserliness of her forbears...
...Although this is a linguistic tour de force of major dimensions, it does not quite come off...
...The most clamorously successful, of course, has been The Leopard, the posthumous opus of the completely unknown Prince of Lampedusa who was rocketed to fame by his international best-seller...
...Reviewed by HELENE CANTARELLA Contributor, "A tlantic," New York "Times Book Review" A spate of compelling first novels, written by men in their 60s and 70s, has appeared of late in Italy...
...It is not surprising, therefore, that they should speak to us in what may seem old-fashioned terms...
...Both are concerned with the destinies of aristocratic families (one on its way down, the other on its way up...
...Unfortunately, young Ippolito von Grueber grows up to be no less reckless and extravagant than his father...
...The plot of Ippolita, despite its complex ramifications, is basically simple...
...Hard on its heels came Ippolita by another Sicilian nobleman, the Duke of Pirajno, physician and retired government official, which has recently been published in this country and in Britain...
...These new writers cannot by any manner or means be classified among those who have determined the course of Italian letters since the War...
...When Ippolita's frigidity precludes the begetting of an heir, Konrad finds solace in a promiscuity that soon becomes legendary...
...The author's English style, vibrant with strength and life, occasionally trips into foreignness which falls uncomfortably on the eye and ear...
...This phenomenon, curious as it may seem, is no mere coincidence, nor is it restricted to aristocrats...
...It seems carping to take Alberto Denti di Pirajno to task for having written both the Italian and English versions of the novel...
...But here the similarity ends...
...Embittered, Ippolita gives full vent to her latent atavistic avarice and devotes her considerable energies to enlarging her vast holdings...
...If The Leopard has Tolstoyan overtones, Ippolita is closer to Stendhal in the sweep of its bold coloration, in its lusty description of the blood, sweat and intrigue that go into amassing the kind of fortune that makes possible the extravagances of a princely household...
...But just as Ippolita is about to lose her grip over him, tragedy overtakes Ippolito and his bride...
...This is particularly true of The Leopard and Ippolita which, besides being novels in the so-called "great tradition," have other features in common...
...To defend herself against the covetous plans of the Raugeo clan, Ippolita legitimizes the child...
...Hers is avarice raised to the dramatic heights of a grand passion whose force reduces her soul to a tangle of conflicting emotions...
...But this is a minor point that should not keep anyone from the compensating delights of this otherwise genuine spellbinder...
...If anything, they are submerged voices from a maturing generation that should have been heard under Fascism but was silenced because of its "age" by the cult of youth which the regime elevated over 20 long years into a crippling fetish...
...In doing so, she achieves the aristocratic status for which three generations of her family have undergone untold toil and deprivation...
...Nicknamed the "Mad Hussar" for his extravagance and his prowess on the battlefield, Konrad is a giant endowed with "apocalyptic appetites...
...The most interesting is perhaps Antonio Pizzuto who, after his retirement as a police officer, has written two noteworthy novels, the last of which, Si Rammendano Bambole ("Dolls Mended Here") has attracted wide critical attention in Italy...
...Untrammelled at last, Ippolita, now an old woman, reigns over her possessions alone, a titanic harpy obsessed by the greed that becomes her sole raison d'??tre...
...Ippolita Raugeo, the only daughter of tight-fisted, wealthy farmers living in an unspecified duchy of the Po Valley (possibly either Modena or Parma) at the peak of the Napoleonic wars, marries an impoverished but glamorous Austrian cavalry officer, Baron Konrad von Grueber...
...Besides these indubitably gifted noblemen there have been other elderly "non-professional" writers who have turned out first novels of more than ordinary stature...
...Moving against a vast, seething, panoramic background that provides a broad picture of life ranging from the humblest peasant hut on the Raugeo estate to Imperial court circles in Vienna where both Konrad and Ippolito, as aides-de-camp to the Emperor had entr?©e, she is a memorable figure-solid, vital and entirely credible...
Vol. 45 • November 1962 • No. 24
