Finished reading History, a fairly massive novel (in translation)  about Italy a bit before, during and after World War II.
Although there are many characters, at the center of the story is Ida, a schoolteacher and her sons, an older boy nicknamed Nino, born of her marriage (her husband dies before the war) and Useppe, a small child, the product of Ida’s rape by a German soldier.
The novel takes you deep into two worlds: the privation and suffering during war and the inner life of little Useppe, who is part child and part sponge, taking in all around him through the filter of an incipiently poetic mind and (as becomes tragically clear as the book progresses) a self afflicted by severe epilepsy.
Each section of the novel is introduced by an account of the major events in world politics during the year in question – what is recorded as history. What follows is a different history – the history of the poor whose lives are so profoundly affected, in ways for which they did not ask and could not imagine – a history that generally goes unrecorded except for calculations of the dead.
As a documentary it is important and most of the time, interesting and important to ponder, not only as history, but as a reminder of the suffering war brings, a suffering that does not lie in the past and whose victims continue to call to us today. The times in which the novel falters are during pages in which a couple of characters, in particular, are given the stage to make long, long, long speeches – perhaps they were important, but I confess, I only skimmed them, as I did some of the backstory of characters I wasn’t that interested in. The purpose was clearly to give a full sense of these people’s lives, but sometimes it was a little too full, I think, even with that purpose.
What was interesting was pondering the experience of this woman, Ida – who is a little off all the way through, excessively timid and paralyzingly shy, unable to advocate for herself – as not only the story of a specific woman in the rubble of war, but as a metaphor. She is half-Jewish herself, and lives in terror of being discovered during the German occupation of Rome. Raped by a German soldier, she births, in veritable secret, attended by a Jewish midwife (who ends up shipped to her death along with much of the rest of the Roman Ghetto), this child who suffers greatly, but is gifted with an acute sensibility of the transcendent. Malnourished and neglected, he meets a tragic fate, which sends Ida herself over the edge into a solemn, steady kind of madness, something perhaps she had barely kept at bay during the years of the war.
The novel is the fruit of Morante’s experiences outside Rome during and after the war among refugees, bombing victims, resistors and partisans, but she didn’t write it until the 1970’s. She was determined to tell the story, to give an account, remember the suffering, and the political point is also clear – that ordinary people suffer greatly, needlessly and anonymously because of the megalomania of their leaders. And although, at the time of the writing, life had certainly improved, there is no hope to be found in this novel. As with Useppe, Morante seems to suggest, any intimations of beauty and love that we glimpse are taken away from us by History, indifferent as it grimly marches on.