Donato Carrisi: The Whisperer (2009)

Translation: Shaun Whiteside, 2010
Edition: Abacus, 2011
Review number: 1460


Three stories come together at the beginning of The Whisperer. An investigator specialising in finding missing children rescues a boy and a girl form a paedophile, before she is immediately reassigned to work with a serial killer investigation. Although this is not Mila's area of expertise, the reason is apparent from the second strand of the story, in which five severed left arms are found buried in a wood, then a six. The first five clearly belong to five girls reported missing, but no sixth girl is known to have disappeared. The last body has another difference from the others: medical evidence suggests that she might still be alive. The clock is ticking though, as even with the proper care, she only has another ten days outside a hospital. The third thread is a description of a desperate drive by a man with an appalling secret hidden in his car, which ends and joins the serial killer thread when he is stopped by the police.

The story itself consistently seems far-fetched, but is still quite compelling to read. Serial killers who enjoy setting cryptic puzzles for the police are bread and butter for crime thriller writers, as sinister monks haunted the catacombs in eighteenth century gothic romances. The paedophile preying on children is the terror of our age, no matter how rare he might be. Using the medical deadline given to the missing girl imposes dramatic tension on the story, albeit one which feels artificial - the child has been kidnapped: are the searchers going to waste their time on Facebook without this extra incentive? All these things add up to a hackneyed plot, if one which is quite well constructed, with twists and turns in every chapter.

I found the style of The Whisperer uninspiring, descending into lazy journalistic clichés such as "It all kicked off when...".  It is hard to tell whether this is the fault of Carrisi himself, or of the translator Shaun Whiteside. In the early chapters, I found myself considering not bothering to continue several times, because I found the writing so off-putting. Eventually, though, I was drawn in, and did keep going, even though one of the twists in the story involves something I always feel is a cheat in an apparently realistic detective story: the use of a medium.

Nothing like as good as the hype - too clichéd, too poorly written, and too over the top to be seriously read as a thriller. (Maybe it's a spoof, and I just didn't notice.) My rating: 4/10.

Luigi Pirandello: Right You Are! (If You Think So) (1918)

Translation: Frederick May, 1962
Edition: Penguin, 1969
Review number: 1044

This particular play takes a different view of Pirandello's general theme of play-acting from most of them. Instead of being about the actors themselves, it is about a group of people trying to work out what the truth is about others. Someone new has recently moved into town, and has established his mother in law in a flat away from the family home, something regarded as faintly scandalous - what could possibly be the reason for excluding her from the household? Town busybodies set out to find out the truth, only to discover that the mother in law tells one story, while her son in law tells another incompatible with it; and because of a natural disaster in their native city, it is impossible to find out which is true.

Pirandello manages to make us feel curiousity about the issue, while at the same time making us feel ashamed to be as insensitively inquisitive as the characters on stage. The play is funny even on the page, and would be hilarious on stage. Right You Are! (If You Think So) may not be his most profound drama, but is certainly entertaining.

Luigi Pirandello: The Rules of the Game (1919)

Translation: Robert Rietty, 1959
Edition: Penguin, 1969
Review number: 1043


The Rules of the Game revolves around three characters: Silia, her lover Guido, and her seemingly complaisant husband Leone. The arrival of a group of drunk young men at Silia's flat when she is entertaining Guido and the insults they offer her thinking she is a prostitue provide the catalyst for the play when Leone (who was not there at the time) insists on playing the role of the outraged husband and challenging the leader of the young men to a duel.

The Rules of the Game comes before Pirandello's big success with Six Characters in Search of an Author and isn't as focused on the philosophical question of part playing as some of his later plays. It has some of the elements of farce, and should be extremely funny on stage, and it is thus successful on its own terms.

Luigi Pirandello: Henry IV (1922)

Translation: Frederick May, 1962
Edition: Penguin, 1969
Review number: 1042

Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello's breakthrough play, remains his best known, despite efforts (such as in the introduction to this collection) to declare Henry IV his masterpiece. It certainly encapsulates his interest as a dramatist (basically, in the different ways in which a part can be played) very cleverly, as well as being an effective drama in its own right.

In the first scene we see the first take on the idea of playing a part. Here, four men arrive, one of them new; they are to play the part of attendants to Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. Unfortunately, the new one has assumed that the ruler is Henry IV of France, and so has read up and assumed the part of a French lord five centuries later. The four of them turn out to be attendants not, as initially seems, in a play about the Emperor, but to a rich Count who lapsed into madness following an injury received during a pageant in which he was playing Henry IV. That is another form of play-acting, and his delusion is a sort of unconscious playing of a part. (And the most famous scene from Henry's life involved him playing out a remorse and humility he most certainly didn't feel when he was forced to beg the Pope's forgiveness and was kept waiting barefoot in the snow at Canossa for days.) Of course, there is also the irony always part of Pirandello's work that all these characters are parts played by actors.

Even by itself, Henry IV is a pretty comprehensive review of the different ways in which people can play a part, and this is presumably the reason why people want it to be considered Pirandello's masterpiece rather than the more limited Six Characters. But the other play continues to be better known, partly because it has such an intriguing title, partly because the history behind Henry IV is to many people obscure, and partly because to an English language audience there is an obvious possibility of confusion with the Shakespeare plays of the same name.

Giovanni Guareschi: The House that Nino Built (1953)

Translation: Frances Frenaye, 1953
Edition: Gollancz, 1954
Review number: 592

In a similar vein of light-hearted charm to the much better known Don Camillo series, The House that Nino Built seems to have dated more. It is the story of the move made by artist and author Nino and his family from the town to the country. It gives the appearance of being, like most of the Don Camillo stories, originally columns from a magazine.

The main reason that the stories have dated is because of their attitude to women, which is patronising to say the least. Nino views his wife almost like a favourite pet, and is continually writing about her irrationality. Attitudes to children have also changed a lot since the mid fifties.

The annoyance produced by this militates against the charm of the stories, making them seem rather coy. The best few, such as the tale of Nino's daughter's first communion, break through this, but most do not. The fault is generally exacerbated by the exaggerations which creep into what are obviously intended to appear to be semi-autobiographical stories. (These exaggerations are presumably meant to be humorous, but are too overdone to really be so.) This is particularly the case with descriptions of the inconveniences of the new house in the country, which include doors opening onto walls because of the unplanned way in which it was renovated.

Giovanni Guareschi: Comrade Don Camillo (1964)

Translation: Frances Frenaye, 1964
Edition: Gollancz, 1964
Review number: 538

The magazine in which the later Don Camillo stories were published folded as the Italian political situation changed and people lost interest in the old battle between the Church and the Communists. Comrade Don Camillo was published in its last few issues, and is unique in the series in that it was conceived as a unified narrative.

The plot is basically that mayor Peppone, now a Senator, is offered the chance to take a group of faithful members of the Communist Party on a trip to the Soviet Union. Don Camillo persuades Peppone to take him in the guise of one of these Party members, because he is curious to see something of the truth behind the propaganda.

It is an interesting if implausible idea, thought the principal virtue of the Don Camillo series, its charm, is distinctly weakened when the tales are removed from their native Po valley.

Giovanni Guareschi: Don Camillo and the Devil (1957)

Translation: Frances Frenaye, 1957
Edition: Gollancz, 1957
Review number: 520

More of the same in another sequel to The Little World of Don Camillo. These stories lack much of the freshness of the earlier ones, and the political message has slightly changed from being anti-Communist to the idea that there are more important things than politics. These stories were written about the time of the Hungarian uprising, which may have had something to do with this. I think these are the last short stories about Don Camillo and Peppone, the only other book being the novel Comrade Don Camillo. The Italian political scene had left them behind, and the reason for their existence had gone.

Giovanni Guareschi: Don Camillo's Dilemma (1954)

Translation: Frances Frenaye, 1954
Edition: Gollancz, 1954
Review number: 498

While the later collections of Guareschi's tales of the little world of Don Camillo never quite match the freshness of the first one, Don Camillo's Dilemma is one of the best of them. The politics are rather more clearly apparent, and despite the words given to Christ saying that he is part of no political party it is clear where Guareschi's own sympathies lie - almost all the stories end with the triumph of the church over (some, at least) of the Communists of the village. The villagers still want children baptised, even if they don't believe in God.

The delight of these stories is the naive and sincere nature of the villagers, which can easily become a pleasure derived from a smug feeling of comparative sophistication. Guareschi has too much respect for his characters to allow this to happen, and so the enjoyment the stories produce is tinged by a slight regret for something that we have lost.

Giovanni Guareschi: Don Camillo and the Prodigal Son (1952)

Translation: Frances Frenaye, 1952
Edition: Gollancz
Review number: 482

The second collection of Don Camillo stories continues to be charming, though it is not as good as the first. The limitations of the chosen subject begin to become apparent, and some of the stories from Don Camillo and the Prodigal Son are little more than repetitions of ones from The Little World of Don Camillo. The altar crucifix plays a rather smaller role than it does in the first book, which is a pity (though the voice of Christ is barely present in the best story here, which is about a false news report leading the local Communists to think that the Italian general election has been won and that the time has come for the eradication of the reactionary forces of repression, starting with Don Camillo himself). The style of the new translator is virtually indistinguishable from that of the first book's (Una Vincenzo Troubridge).

Giovanni Guareschi: The Little World of Don Camillo (1948)

Translation:  Una Vincenzo Troubridge
Edition: Gollancz
Review number: 469

Having recently been disappointed on re-reading several novels which had delighted me in the past, it was with some trepidation that I returned to the first (and best) of the collections of Don Camillo stories. The stories of the tiny village on the Po continue to delight, thankfully. Originally written as a series of satires in an Italian political magazine, the stories are still amusing even though the political events which gave birth to them are long gone - and I am fairly certain that this will not be the case with many of their modern equivalents.

Don Camillo is the priest in this small village, whose perpetual enemy is the Communist mayor Peppone. The two have a mutual respect and often get along quite well, despite their political differences. (In the late forties, the Roman Catholic church was a strongly anti-Communist political force in Italy.) The other major character is the voice of Christ, who speaks to Don Camillo from the crucifix on the altar of the village church, and effectively acts as his conscience.

Each story takes the form of some triggering event (a visit from a bishop, or Peppone's wife bringing a baby for baptism with the name Lenin, for example), which leads to conflict between priest and mayor, usually resolved because they are both good fellows at heart. The political fighting goes on because it is good fun in itself rather than the means to an end, which prevents it from becoming too serious and means that these stories have not lost their interest with the loss of relevance of the political issues that they cover. Above all, thought, it is the simple, good natured charm of the people of the village which has ensured their survival as comedy.

Ugo Betti: The Queen and the Rebels (1949)

Translation: Henry Reed, 1960
Edition: Penguin, 1960
Review number: 127

The Queen and the Rebels is a play which reminded me of Shaw, particularly of Arms and the Man. That may be partly to do with the setting, a middle European war, or may be to do with the translation; it is always difficult to know anything about the tone of a play when it is translated from a language which one does not speak. In this case, I suspect that Henry Reed has chosen to write in a Shavian style, for, other than superficialities of setting, The Queen and the Rebels is not a comedy nor does it have a strong didactic purpose.

The play itself concerns a group of travellers stranded by the war and suspected by the side controlling the village where their train has been stopped of being spies. One of the leaders of the other side was a woman of noble extraction known to both her followers and her enemies as "The Queen". She is believed to have escaped the destruction of her headquarters and to be attempting to flee the country, in disguise.

Once this is established, the theme of the play begins to become clear: it is to do with identity. There are two women in the party of travellers, a peasant woman and a girl who is apparently a wealthy call-girl named Argia. The latter is suspected of being the queen, but she herself treats the peasant woman as though she is the queen. Relying on the villagers' interpreter, Raim, who knew her before the war, to establish her identity, she has the ground pulled out from under her when he refuses to do so for fear of the authorities (who might then decide he is an accomplice).

All the questions which arise are about real identity. Which of the two women is the queen, if either of them are? (If Argia is the queen, what she says to the peasant woman could be just in case she's overheard, and Raim could indeed by a former accomplice.) The other question of identity left unanswered is which side is formed by the rebels of the title?

Alessandro Manzoni: The Betrothed (1827)

Translation: Bruce Penman, 1972
Edition: Penguin
Review number: 122

The Bethrothed is probably the most famous work of Italian literature not by Dante or Petrarch. The introduction to this Penguin Classics edition compares its influence on Italian culture to an English scene where Dickens wrote only one novel and Fielding and Thackeray had never existed. Its revision by Manzoni into the Tuscan dialect was a major turning point in the establishment of that dialect as the standard literary Italian.

It is a long historical novel (written in the nineteenth but dealing with the early seventeenth century) with a somewhat melodramatic plot which to an English reader is distinctly reminiscent of Scott. In the early seventeenth century, the duchy of Milan was ruled by Spain, though the Spanish viceroys were unable to check the excesses and crimes of the upper classes, who employed large numbers of thugs known as bravos to get their way. Italy was also subject to famine and periodic epidemics of plague, both of which play a part in The Betrothed.

Two villagers, Renzo and Lucia, are on the point of marriage when Lucia catches the eye of local tyrant Don Rodrigo, who threatens the village priest into refusing to marry them. As they flee from Don Rodrigo's bravos, they become separated and get involved with the turbulent events of the Thirty Years' War as it affected Milan. Manzoni mixes his invented characters with real historical figures and their stories with great skill.

The main charm of the narrative is not the plot, but Manzoni's ironical tone and frequent asides to the reader. He manages not to overuse this device (unlike most authors who make use of it), carefully controlling his writing so that the reader is not put off.