Reviews

Historien by Elsa Morante

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sidharthvardhan's review against another edition

5.0

It is a difficult book to rate. May be that four star is that Stockalm syndrome showing up – it is a big book.

And it feels big; big and slow. Sometimes it appears to be badly edited. There are whole passages that only repeat the things. The prose isn’t the best thing but then I read only translation.

Still, it presents a very original worldview. The narrator is like normal omniscient narrators except that she is not omniscient since she is often pointing out things she doesn’t know about. Also, she seems to show Dickens like fondness for her characters. You know how Dickens sometimes talks about his characters, the way parents talk about their children, “Look how cute they are!” (and you are like “Yes, they are sweet” while you search your pocket your insulin pill.) That.

The thing is I don’t like kids, they give me creeps, room-one-o-one-e creeps. And this happens to be a story about a little bastard and his mother living through the Second World War. Not swearing, Useppe is actually a bastard. There are pages upon pages describing him doing ‘cute’ things (pronouncing words wrongly- ‘wy’ for ‘why’, making friends with animals etc). Never before I’ve felt like wanting to smother a fictional character so much. With camera focused on him for so much of time, you remember that age old idea that there is a lot to be learnt from children. But at the same time, Useppe is also a war kid and war did in the end got him. Towrds the end, he is physically unhealthy (not getting proper food during war time) and suffers from inexplicable mood swings. Having suffered upon losses at an early age, he is afraid of making new bonds etc.

The narrator’s cutification (?) doesn’t end with babies. It goes further into realm of animals. We have in this story – a street dog, a cat, her kittens, two canaries, more canaries, a mule, a rat, a rabbit, another street dog, a female dog, her puppies, sparrows, more sparrows... Many people in the story have pets which are at times their best and only friends. And animal are in fact important characters in the story. If you are kind of person who likes to watch videos of animals doing stupid things on youtube, you will love it. In the beginning narrator is only describing (in great detail) their actions; then slowly she starts guessing what they were trying to tell with their gestures and sounds; and by the end, we are treated with a conversation between a kid and dog. The dog told him a story to pass time.

Her cutesque view is extended to grownups as well. The narrator says of Ida, Useppa’s mother, that she is just a child in a grownup’s body. And by the end, it seems to be true for almost all the major characters in the story, they all seem to be really like children inside, only pretending to be grownups because they find themselves in a world where they are expected to act like grownups. Even the SS soldier who raped Ida in the beginning of the book is represented much like a lost kid and you can’t help feeling sorry for him. The soldiers who survived the war were suffering depression because of killing he had to do. The narrator extends her compassion to other underdogs too – Jews who died in camps, Jews who survived the camps, dead soldiers, their families, poor, homeless, those who suddenly lost their homes due to war, prostitutes etc.

And it was very well done. When she is not cutenizing the world, the narrator builds characters of great psychological depth – actually referencing Freud by name. The kid is suffering from a disease called grand mal; which in first stages causes ‘Violent convulsive fits with total loss of consciousness’. Narrator is often describing dreams of her characters. One of my favorite parts was when Ida finds herself walking anxiously in a dream with a weight on her shoulder, a weight which she quickly realizes to be her suckling, Useppe; since she is used to carry him around day in, day out.

And oh, a lot of it is about motherhood. The relationship between Ida and her son is one the best portrayal of parental bond I’ve seen. And there are at least four pregnancies within span of the book, of which two are of human beings.
So you have children, animals, adult children, mothers …

“There is a story about a tigress who, in a chill solitude, kept herself and her cubs alive by licking the snow and distributing to her little ones some scraps of meat that she ripped from her own body with her teeth.”

The wrongs seem to all come from governments (as usual). The chapters are grouped into sections, most sections are named after a war-year or post-war year. Each section begins with a brief description of political developments that took place throughout the whole world in that year. However the impact that those developments have on people of Morante’s world in that year is indirect and so far beyond their power, that the political heads may as well have been living in different world, like Greek gods torturing people according to their whims. Most of Morante’s people don’t question their fate and seems to be going through their lives despite everything; the few who do question do not even start to achieve anything with their efforts.

It is in the end, not so much a story about those who died in the war, but those who survived it – their suffering is best understood in image of that child (a scene from book) struggling, with an angst he can neither comprehend nor fight, and failing; finding the only vent to his frustration in that repeated moaning “Wy wy wy..”