In memory of the vulnerable of all wars

What does Natalia Ginzburg mean when she says that The History What is the most beautiful novel of the 20th century? Not only because it's a literary ambitious work, but because it goes to the core. The almost eight hundred pages of The History, by Elsa Morante (Rome, 1912-1985), they strike us where it hurts most, which is in the heart. The story—now in lowercase—of Ida Ramundo and her son Useppe, who is barely two inches off the ground, touches us deeply. This powerful choral novel is a hymn to human resilience and the everyday heroism of the weakest, capable of displaying a Numantian fortitude.

During World War II—the most devastating and lacerating war we have experienced so far—Rome was a besieged and wounded city. A bombing raid sank the building where Ida lived, killed her eldest son's dog, Nino, and left her and her young son, the fruit of the rape she suffered at the hands of a young German soldier wandering alone through the streets of Rome, homeless. In this work, the author embodies the double vulnerability of women in armed conflicts. Throughout the novel, we witness the survival instinct of this courageous mother, a humble Jewish teacher.

Elsa Morante's Ida lacks the beauty of Claudia Cardinale, who played her in the 1980s film, but is a dull, ordinary woman who becomes increasingly invisible due to the misery of the war and the hardships of the immediate future.

The first obstacle is the unwanted pregnancy, which she has no choice but to accept: "Even though the pregnancy progressed, it wasn't difficult for Ida to hide it. Her body, already full and disproportionate from the waist to below the pelvis, was reduced. It was obvious that the hidden and malnourished creature could only be a lightweight, not requiring much space." Little Useppe was born prematurely, scrawny, and destined not to grow too much, despite being as smart as anyone else. From the soldier, she inherited Germanic blue eyes.

After losing their home, Ida and Useppe move into a refugee shelter, overflowing with defeated people like themselves. Only occasionally does Nino appear, as much of a blowhard as Quimet de Diamond Square, who fights against the fascists. Ida goes out every day in search of food, a commodity that was very scarce at the time. The History It is a novel against totalitarianism that leads to cruel wars, where the teacher and the child give us the exact dimension of its fatal consequences.

A great novel with a magnificent translation

In 1974, when the novel was published, the author—incidentally, the illegitimate daughter of a teacher—wanted it to be published in an affordable edition so that the poor could read it. It sold 650,000 copies and caused quite a stir. Her colleagues accused her of being nineteenth-century, and certainly, with her omniscient narrator—or narrator, The History It seems like a 19th-century realist novel. But its prose is too anchored in the deepest roots of the 20th century to be accused of anything of the sort. The reading is not heavy and is very stimulating. deficient of a small child, and it has turned out excellently.

Morante prefaces each chapter with objective data of the real events, from Italy's aggression against Greece in 1940 to the race for the atomic bomb in 1944. In contrast, the microhistory of the mother and her bedraggled son, and the many secondary characters that surround them, in a metaphorical Rome that could be the Rome open city, by Roberto Rossellini, brings to literature what so many millions of citizens suffered in their own skin.