A love obsession in the midst of a country at war

A personal matter It is a short novel that offers the reader an intense picture of what the partisan resistance was like for Beppe Fenoglio (Alba, 1922 – Turin, 1963): a time of hypocrisy and contradictions, but also of genuine humanity. Drawing on his own experience as a partisan, Fenoglio also updates the narrative of the civil war in the Langhe region of Piedmont, an important theme in the literature of other Italians such as Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino.

The plot ofA personal matter It is set in November 1944, during the final months of World War II and at the height of the civil war between partisans and fascists. The protagonist is Milton, a young partisan, a graduate of Badoglio's English literature program. When he visits the home of Fulvia, the girl he loves, he learns of her relationship with Giorgio Clerici, Milton's friend and comrade-in-arms. Fenoglio's antihero is haunted by a doubt—Fulvia's possible infidelity—and this suspicion unfolds like a bad omen that infects everything: every step in the mountains, every encounter with fellow resistance fighters, every glance at the rarefied air of war. Fenoglio portrays a young, blinded soul, unable to detach itself from what is, in reality, its true battlefront: wounded pride.

A man in search of the truth

The story unfolds over four days, at the end of which Milton, in his search for the truth, is ambushed by fifty fascist soldiers. He flees for an interminable amount of time, only to die, having discovered nothing, near a forest that would have saved him from enemy bullets. Fenoglio, with his characteristic way of feigning indifference while simultaneously delivering a devastating blow, transforms the partisan struggle into a stage for intimate obsessions, for loves that fester like a poorly healed wound. And this is where the book's power explodes: in the tension between the noise of the world and the stubborn murmur of desire.

The omniscient narrator adopts the point of view of the characters he describes, particularly Milton. The treatment of the events of the Italian Civil War, running parallel to the narrated events, is noteworthy. It is interesting to observe how the plot and the story are not one and the same. To tell the characters' stories or to better understand the narrative, the author makes extensive use of analepsis, both in dialogue and narration. The text's objective, besides describing the partisans' tragic situation, is to highlight how life, even when guided by the noblest sentiments, doesn't always end happily. The prose vibrates with a kind of electric dryness. No embellishment: everything is sharp, abrupt, as if the sentences knew there was no time to get lost in parentheses. This urgency sustains the novel like a racing heartbeat threatening to explode at any moment. As Milton chases after a truth that perhaps doesn't exist, the reader senses that this race is less moral than emotional, less political than visceral.

Fenoglio makes a brilliant move: he transforms the war into a distorting mirror of the human heart. The armed conflict is not just a context, but an amplifier. And in this amplifier, jealousy is screams, fear is trembling, and love is a wound that never quite heals.