Veromika’s Reviews > History > Status Update

The German soldier raping Ida is narrated almost dispassionately, relying on facts and surroundings, more than morals. The narrator stays neutral and detached, making the clinical telling of Ida's rape more palpable and brutal. I had an intense emotional reaction while reading it.
With this novel, Elsa Morante is peeling back layers of how war decimates lives at all levels and in all ways.

You get the sense of reading a systematic entry of the lives of a bourgeois family in Italy during the war. I'm not yet sure who the protagonist is.
The writing resembles Dickens in a way, but without the wry humour.