Arturo’s Island

"This is Elsa Morante’s great book. She was [the author] Alberto Moravia’s wife. I don’t know how suited they were as a couple. He was a very cool guy who would never commit himself entirely and she was a passionate young woman who had left home incredibly early, aged 16 or 17, and she was determined to be adored by him. So perhaps it was precisely the fact that he would never quite adore her that kept her trying to get herself adored by him and then punishing him for not adoring her. So I think they were together for about 20 years, and to me she is one of the top four or five narrators in 20th century Italian literature. This book is completely unique. You won’t find anything like this in the whole of literature. The voice is very strange and the story is told from a distance. We don’t know how old the narrator is but he is talking about when he was a little boy growing up in isolation on a little island off Naples called Procida. He’s living in this very old house where he’s looked after very occasionally by a servant. His mother is dead – she died in childbirth. His father, who he adores and thinks of as a very great hero, is always away on business, whatever that business may be, in Naples. And he’s a little boy constantly inventing the world and desiring to be taken into the world of his father and the world of adults, and the only thing he has got to go on when inventing the world is the library in the house he’s in, which is a library full of literature about classical heroes. So he models the imagined world on that and, of course, as he gradually becomes aware of what his father is really doing, which I won’t reveal, and then gradually becomes aware of sexuality, he just constantly has to revise the opinions that he’s got from all these books. Morante’s great theme is simply the extent to which we all have to constantly fabricate the world and create a mental space that we can live in, and how difficult it is to bring that mental space ever into a stable relationship with the circumstances that we actually live in. It reads almost as a fairy tale at the beginning and it becomes really quite a terrifying psychological reality as the book proceeds. It’s a brilliant book. One of my favourites in any language, any time. One always hesitates to use words like emblems and symbols because the fact is the boy does live on an island and it’s a real island, but you can see how leaving the island would also mean leaving childhood and leaving his ability to actually control what he thinks of the world. Prisons are always very important in Morante’s work and in the middle of Procida there was a prison and that prison and one of the convicts become very important in the book. But the whole question of imprisonment, whether one is actually imprisoned in a mental idea about the world or whether reality is a prison and freedom is actually inventing a different idea of the world, is very rich in Morante. Perhaps stronger than that is the tension between the local and regional dialect and the new and imposed language of unification. Italy was unified by 1860 officially, and then really in 1870 when Rome was added, and at that time less than 5% of Italians spoke what is now considered Italian. They spoke all their various dialects of Italian, and so Italian literature, which had to be largely written in Italian, was in a way being written in a second language by most people. For example [Alessandro] Manzoni, who wrote the great founding novel of the new Italy in The Betrothed , says in his letters what a bore it is when he and his friends are talking together in a Milanese dialect and somebody comes in from a different region and they have to speak Italian, and how difficult it is to really express yourself freely in Italian. I think this is something Svevo felt a great deal. In Zeno’s Conscience he says, “When we people speak Italian in Trieste we are always lying because we can’t really tell the truth in this language.” So that just adds to the whole identity problem. So the question of home is often felt more in that tension between dialect and Italian than maybe in the question of emigrating. Pavese’s book for example has very much that tension between the country place, which is a place of intimacy and dialect, and the city place, which is a place of public world and public language."