History

"Morante creates the story of the mother, Ida, and the child Useppe (a nickname for Giuseppe) born during the Second World War, the outcome of a rape by a German soldier. Useppe is the sweetest child ever described in a book. He keeps his joy of life amidst the atrocities around him. You see the unbearable contradiction between the nature of war and the fragility of a family. Morante opposes the anonymity of war—the war of masses, states, armies, troops—to the individual, to the uniqueness of Ida, Useppe and Bella their dog. “The great power of literature—as opposed to the power of mass media—is that if 1,000 people read the same book, the book reads each of them differently” This is what literature is about—a commitment to the individual. There is the terrible sentence by Stalin, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” Literature tries to redeem the tragic life of the individual from the anonymous statistic of Stalin. The great power of literature—as opposed to the power of mass media where ten million watch a reality programme and are almost glued together with kitsch and self-righteous sentimentality—is that if 1,000 people read the same book, the book reads each of them differently. La Storia is special in its mixture of imagination and facts and the orders of the German army and history books and the pamphlets of anarchists and the sweetness of the child who is feeling, in a primal way, when there is danger or evil. The not-so-detached story teller is the voice of a woman. Maybe it is Morante herself, who bestows goodness and a benevolent motherly hand, who leads us through the atrocities, with a sober voice and a lamenting reality. All this has just reminded me of the time I met the mayor of Rome and I told him that next to the sculpture of Romulus and Remus they should make one of Ida and Useppe."

"I open "History: A Novel" and begin reading anywhere — as I do Denis Johnson's Vietnam novel, "Tree of Smoke" — for an immersion in endless, circular truth. Both books brilliantly illustrate the reality that history tells us the facts, but literature tells us the story."

"I adored "History," by Elsa Morante, which is about a woman living through wartime Rome. Morante is underappreciated here, but you could draw a throughline from her to the terrific Elena Ferrante."