Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "europa-editions"

It turned out that, indeed, there was another area of the exhibit that had more publishers of literary fiction than the area I’d previously visited. By the end of the day I had a bag full of so many goodies I had to ship them home. First, I stopped (again) by Europa Editions’s table because I’d been told that they would give books away. I had the unexpected luck of meeting the publisher himself, Kent Caroll, who let me choose two novels. I picked The Worst Intentions by Alessandro Piperno and The Art of Losing by Rebecca Connell.

Then, I found Other Press, another publisher I like not only because of the authors they publish but also because they respect and promote their authors. I know a very good writer, Michelle Hoover, who had a great experience with them, and whose novel, The Quickening, I highly recommend. The people there were all friendly and let me pick whatever I wanted among their advanced reading copies. I took Alberto Moravia’s Two Friends, and the intriguing Calling Mr. King by Ronald de Feo, both forthcoming in September. And, finally, I made a discovery: Biblioasis, an independent publisher from Canada. They have just published The Accident by Mihail Sebastian, a very interesting Romanian writer from the first half of the 20th century.

With my bag full I headed for the autographing table of Carmela Ciuraru, author of Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. As on Tuesday, the autographing area (which included about thirty tables) was swarming with dozens of passionate readers who were patiently waiting in line to get a signature from an author. I asked an organizer where I could buy the book and...I found out that the books were FREE. Well, that explained the passion of all those readers.The QuickeningNom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms

Piperno’s The Worst Intentions (Europa Editions, 2007) has been compared, with some justification, to Ph. Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In fact, Piperno’s novel is better. As a big reader of Proust (I had read all the volumes of A la Recherche… by the time I was 22, and wrote my BA thesis on it) I can say that this is the closest equivalent to Proust’s masterpiece. I usually don’t like such comparisons because they are rarely founded, and even when they are, they indicate that the author of the “equivalent” is no more than a talented epigone. But what makes the comparison to Proust justified in this case is not only the fact that Piperno has deeply absorbed the work of his predecessor—a French scholar, he is the author of a work of literary criticism, Proust Anti-Jew—but also the fact that his novel is extremely contemporary. It is an updated version of Proust in the sense that it gives us a remarkable portrayal of Italian “high” society from the fifties until 2001. The snobbery of this society, while reminiscent of the old-fashion mannerisms of Mme Verdurin’s and Mme de Guermantes’s inner circles, is at the same time very contemporary. Piperno’s snobs are universal because any high-school student who wishes to be “popular” can recognize himself/herself in them; and yet, they are so…Italian. Never before have I read a novel whose protagonists are so concerned with appearance, especially fashion.

Another Proustian element of the novel is the construction of desire (with its corollary, jealousy and/or envy). Daniel, the half-Jewish narrator—who later becomes the author of a successful book with a provocative view on the Jews—is hopelessly in love with the most beautiful, the richest and most popular girl in his school, Gaia. Gaia is a cross between Nabokov’s Lolita and Proust’s Odette—inaccessible (though, as in Proust, it turns out that she is inaccessible only for the narrator, and quite accessible for the others), very desirable and very shallow (the narrator compares her to Britney Spears).

What I find amazing about The Worst Intentions, a novel written in long, complicated, Proustian sentences (translated with sophistication by Ann Goldstein), is that it was a best-seller in Italy.

Jane Gardam’s Man in the Wooden Hat (2009) is a sequel to Old Filth (2006), though both novels can be read independently. The Man…is written from the perspective of Betty, married to Sir Edward Feathers, while Old Filth (Filth being an acronym for “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong”) is told from Filth’s point of view.

The Man in the Wooden Hat is one of those novels that are hard to summarize because what “happens” resides mostly in the interaction between characters—a character-driven story, as they say. The chapters’ titles themselves are emblematic: “Happiness,” “Marriage,” “Life…” Indeed, the only “events” in the novel are the marriage of Eddie and Betty—preceded by her one-night adventure with Eddie’s professional rival (also a lawyer, like Eddie), and in the end, Betty’s death. Yet, this is a very captivating book, and once you begin to read it, is hard to put down. Moving between London, Hong Kong and an idyllic location in the Doneheads, the texture of the novel borrows something from the atmosphere of all these places, so the reading experience translates for the reader into the sensuous feeling of being enveloped in an alien, fascinating fabric.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Europa Editions, 2012. Trans. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.

Persecution by Alessandro Piperno. Europa Editions, 2012. Trans. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.

Europa Editions has become in recent years one of the most important publishing houses of fiction in translation. Among its authors a privileged place is given to contemporary Italian novelists. Having already read and greatly enjoyed Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter and Alessandro Piperno’s The Worst Intentions, I was thrilled to discover My Brilliant Friend and Persecution, both impeccably translated by Ann Goldstein and released this year.

My Brilliant Friend is the story of a friendship between two young Neapolitan women from pre-school age until they reach sixteen, and indirectly a history of Naples from the fifties until the present. I say “until the present” because the story is preceded by a phone conversation between the narrator (Elena) and one of the children of the narrator’s friend, Lila. Elena, who is now sixty-six, is informed that Lila has disappeared, and as a consequence, decides to write the story of their youth. But the novel never returns to the initial frame, and ends, abruptly, with a disturbing scene from Lila’s wedding. This semi-circle, or half-framing, which goes against our expectations as readers, may appear strange to some, but personally, I liked it.

The novel, focused mostly on the two girls growing up in a poor Neapolitan neighborhood and the local family dramas, is more suspenseful and full of excitement than a thriller. The reader is drawn entirely into this world of strong passions and conflicts whose intensity remind one of neorealist films. This coming-of-age story is also a novel about becoming a writer, and about the power of the double. Indeed, the two friends make for a fascinating couple, being opposite and similar at the same time; although with minds of their own, both are dependent on each other, and each thinks of the other as her “brilliant friend.” Lila is the one with a true “voice” and with a fierce sense of independence, and yet, she will remain attached to the same milieu, while Elena will be the one to tell their story.

Ferrante’s world is a violent world, a world in which parents beat their children and husbands their wives, brothers hit their sisters, and male friends feel obligated to engage in a fight each time another male looks at their female companions. Every single time Elena’s group of friends goes out, the outing ends with a fight. And yet, in spite of the violence, this is a deeply humane world.

Piperno’s Persecution is just as intense and, like My Brilliant Friend, has a masterful way of keeping the reader on edge. The novel is a contemporary family drama about a highly successful doctor, Leo Pontecorvo, who has it all: looks; a beautiful, devoted wife; two teenage boys; a great career and, of course, money. A man who’d always been watched over by Providence, Leo has made many enemies but nonchalantly ignored them until one summer day in 1986 when a TV news anchor accuses him of having tried to seduce his thirteen-year-old son’s girlfriend. This is the beginning of Leo’s downfall: eventually, he is accused of rape, but he is so puzzled and embarrassed that he doesn’t even attempt to defend himself before his family, and instead retreats into the house’s cellar.

For the narrator—a mysterious, omniscient voice—Leo is the victim of a disturbed teenage girl and of his family’s lack of faith in him. I would also speculate that this novel is a response to the contemporary cult of the victim, and to the tendency to give immediate credence to stories of abuse. Many European intellectuals regard with suspicious eyes the (primarily American) tendency to make into a hero any self-proclaimed victim, and see this as a consequence of the functioning of contemporary media, and of a perverted idea of “democracy” (basically, a revenge of the “masses” against those more fortunate).

Piperno and Ferrante display a flow and a naturalness of style that come from a vision of literature unhindered by artificial dualisms, such as “craft”/“plot” or “writing”/”story.” They are among that rare species of novelists who, gifted with a critical, analytical mind, are skilled enough to pretend that they simply inhabit their characters, though every once in a while they get out of character, gazing upon it with the critical eye of a god. These novelists prove that good novels are almost always a combination of the skill to entertain and to think critically, and that literary style isn’t simply the result of skillfully moving words around, but the result of being able to structure the world in a new way. After all, sentences are structures, not merely words strung together.