Word: pratolini
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Dates: during 1949-1949
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...TALE OF POOR LOVERS (369 pp.)-Vasco Pratolini-Viking...
...flood of G.I. novels about wartime Italy by letting the Italians speak for themselves. The American veteran's picture of Italy (in such books as All Thy Conquests, The Gallery and The Wolf That Fed Us) stressed the loneliness and isolation of individual Italians and their G.I. counterparts. Pratolini's Tale of Poor Lovers, a novel of Italy after World War I and of the goings-on in Florence's impoverished Via del Corno, makes the converse point: that men's lives are intricately intermingled, for good or evil, with the lives of their neighbors...
...Vasco Pratolini's jigsaw picture of violence, perversion and young love is colored by a tired tenderness for people too much at the mercy of their own appetites and apathies to fight or even to visualize the blackshirt terror closing in. Some readers will not have the patience to keep track of the dozens of lightly sketched characters; others will gag on the implication that communism was the only answer to Mussolini. But A Tale of Poor Lovers is no U.S.-brand party-line novel. It is wise, involved and European-a swarming microcosm of social and psychological complexities...