Quick Review

Fontamara by Ignazio Silone

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Generally speaking, I hate fables. There's something both lazy and a little pompous, frankly, at least when addressing adults, in intending to be universally understood. Nothing is likelier to guarantee tedium in any novel after Kafka than a setting in an unidentified "City." Seldom, at least since Beckett, has an unnamed narrator boded much but ill. If anything awfully difficult to do well, would be the kind of good Communist allegory, nowhere better done perhaps than here, in Fontamara by Ignazio Silone. When is a peasant not a peasant? When he is more tediously the whole of oppressed humanity. (See so-called Soviet realism.) To do this kind of thing so superbly well, requires a certain genius, and more humor than is usual in the earnest Left -- there being absolutely none in the earnest Right, sarcasm aside, by the way, ever. (Try the utterly unfunny and now quite unreadable D'Annunzio of the same period for proof.) When Silone pits his peasants, the cafoni, and his pitiful little hero against the landlords, the Fascists, the new capitalist in the neighborhood, God, it's as if Cervantes sent them against the foe, not a committee. Every crushing encounter ultimately ends not just then in despair but absurdity. That must be true. It certainly feels true. And very Italian And yes, very funny.





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