Elsa Morante's 'The Story' and the Pathos of the Novice Revolutionary
BarcelonaThis summer I read the novel The story (Quaderns Crema) by the Italian author Elsa Morante (Rome, 1912-1985), and it's mid-September and I still haven't forgotten it. It's a masterclass in writing, social commitment, and observation of life; one of those totemic books in the history of literature that I, personally, didn't know about, and that Quaderns Crema has published in our language this year 2025. Marina Laboreo was responsible for translating the novel into Catalan, resulting in a text that flows naturally and naturally, despite the mischievous representations of language it contains (for example, the exercise of translating a small child who is not entirely refined in his speech and who constantly shortens words; a fact of no small importance in understanding not only the entire personality).
As the back cover explains, the book "recounts the events of the Second World War and the immediate postwar period through the eyes of Ida Ramundo, a schoolteacher of Jewish origin, and her young son Useppe, but also through the wide cast of characters who accompany them on their journeys through the neighborhoods and journeys inhabited by refugees, outcasts, fugitives, and other outcasts of society." The storyIt lasts so long (unfortunately, from 1941 to 1947; years of real suffering; 792 resulting pages), that it has space to reconstruct an entire world through literature that is at once a narrative exercise, a journalistic chronicle, a historical document and a collective biography.
As happens with friendships that last and become complex and deep, in The storyYou have the feeling of getting to know the people more and more, page after page. Guided by Ida, the protagonist, you see men and women come and go, and others stay. You take in reality as they experience it and grow accustomed to it, although at times you slightly surpass what the mother knows, because the narrator is omniscient. Nino, Useppe, Davide, the bar manager, and the Jewish neighbor who searches for her family on a deportation train are all extraordinary characters. Ordinary people who had to live through things no one should ever have to, although now it's too late to say this.
The revolutionary residue of families
The story It makes one think about the number of revolutionaries, protesters, and spokespeople there have been throughout humanity, not because they initially had anything particularly clear about their ideas, nor because they had clear political aptitudes; but because they've found each other, because life has made them live through a moment of conflict and they've had to roll up their sleeves. Nino is a fascinating character because first he thinks something, and then reality closes in on him like a sack, and he goes on to defend other ideas, and defends them with the utmost commitment. It also makes one think about the revolutionary background in families, about the ideological tradition that seems to end up embedded in the genes and passed down from generation to generation. And about all those people whose youth and war are mixed, and how the playful nature characteristic of adolescence lives or dies when it comes to facing armed struggle.
In Nino's case, for example, his vitality is shamelessly expressed, and, as if you were Ida, his mother, you wait for pages and pages for him to return to the scene to bring a radical, shocking, fragile, but transcendent light to the work. Not long ago, I saw a video of an Italian man threatening his state by saying that if the flotilla leaving the country for Gaza didn't return alive, the people would take radical measures. The spokesman had the main points of the speech written on his hand, and in the few seconds that the proclamations lasted, he apologized for looking at his palm, but he didn't want to leave anything out. This shock, this pathos of the revolutionary who doesn't have everything in his head, who lacks iron-clad certainty, but must rely on ink half-dripped through the sweat of his fingers, made me think of Nino and his companions, who had been instructing each other as best they could: how history required them as best they could.
Precisely because of the author's social commitment that is reflected in the work, when in 1974 Einaudi published The story For the first time, Elsa Morante insisted that she didn't want the novel to cost more than two thousand lire, that is, to be affordable so everyone could access it. The publication was a success, but it took 51 years to be able to read it in Catalan. Now that we have the opportunity, I can't do enough to recommend it to you. Important books like this are rare, and you remember them forever.