E-Book Overview
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. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver.
E-Book Content
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BY MANUEL PUIG
The Guardian of the Word A Minor Apocalypse
BY CAMARA LAYE
BY TADEUSZ KONWICKI
The Ten Thousand Things
BY MARIA DERMOUT
We Love Glenda So Much and A Change of Light
BY JULIO CORT..I.ZAR
Ake: The Years of Childhood Correction
BY WOLE soYINKA
BY THOMAS BERNHARD
Maira
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BY MANLIO ARGUETA
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BY JIRi GRUSA
HISTORY A NOVEL
HISTORY A NOVEL ELSA MORANTE Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
AVENTURA
The Vintage Library of Contemporary World Literature VINTAGE BOOKS
A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE
NEW YORK
First Aventura Edition, March 1984 Translation Copyright© 1977 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. This translation originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1977. Originally published in Italian as La Storia: Romanzo by Giulio Einaudi Editore, S.P.A., Turin. Copyright© 1974 by Elsa Morante and Giulio Einaudi Editore, S.P.A., Torino. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Morante, Elsa, 1916History.
( Aventura-the Vintage library of contemporary world literature ) Translation of: La Storia. I. Title.
P Q4829.0615S813 1984
853'.912
83-40512
ISBN 0-394-72496-8 Manufactured in the United States of America
Por el anal/abeto a quien escribo
There is no word in the human language capable of consoling the guinea pigs who do not know the reason for their death.
( A sun>ivor of Hiroshima )
. . . thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes for so it seemed good in thy sight.
Luke 1 0: 21
Contents
...... 19--
I 1
... .. 1941
I 65
.. ... 1942
I 97
...... 1943
I 119
...
1944
I 249
.. ... 1945
I 307
... 1946
I 331
. . . 1947
I 411
. .... 19--
I 549
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Notes I 5