HISTORY was written nearly 3 decades after Morante spent a year hiding from the Germans in 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 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 ...
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HISTORY was written nearly 3 decades after Morante spent a year hiding from the Germans in 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 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 and leaves her pregnant with a boy whose survival becomes Ida's passion, and her source of joy and meaning amid universal catastrophe.
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Seller's Description:
Very good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
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Seller's Description:
Good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
London. 1978. Allen Lane. 1st British Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0713911190. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 562 pages. hardcover. Cover: David Quay. keywords: Literature Translated Italy Women. FROM THE PUBLISHER-Internationally recognized as a literary masterpiece and the most exciting novel to come out of Italy since World War II-Elsa Morante's HISTORY A NOVEL marks her emergence as a novelist of world rank and significance. It is an immense novel, speaking with an immense and affecting power of-and for-the myriad ordinary, ‘unhistoric' people whose lives, bloodied in every generation, are the raw material from which ‘great' men fashion the ‘great' events that are History. Rome. World War II. In the faceless, crowded slums on the edge of the ghetto, a desperately poor, ill-educated schoolteacher-now a widow-struggling to raise her delinquent son (and in terrified flight from the authorities: she is half-Jewish) is raped by a young German soldier. She gives birth to a child. Her entire existence becomes a battle to keep her family together, to hoard the merest crumbs of food, shelter, safety. Her elder son, Nino-uncontrollable, charming, greedy for life, flirting with fascism, prostitution, petty thievery-moves now to a more mysterious and frightening involvement with the Resistance, with the black market, with gun-running. And Useppe, the beautiful, doubly illegitimate baby, begins to grow into a gifted but curiously vulnerable child, enchanting the world around him, enchanted by it, yet oddly aware that he is doomed. Around them, the whole monstrous landscape of war: the bombing of Rome; the chance glimpse of a sealed cattle car echoing with human, not animal, cries; the friends caught in random atrocities as retreating Germans clash with Partisans. And finally the ‘peace, ' bringing only continuing chaos and privation. Here, at once intimately and panoramically conveyed, is the true flesh of history: human beings-utterly individual, yet emblematic of ourselves-trapped in alien complexity beyond their control, still managing to snatch moments of hope amidst despair, even moments of joy. And all this is told with an absolute emotional truth, with an unconstricted fullness of circumstance and feeling that recalls the nineteenth-century novel at its greatest. inventory #32687.
