Word: rimanelli
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tourists and fewer novelists visit the Molise region, which stretches, a withered Achilles tendon, above the heel of the Italian peninsula. Novelist Giose Rimanelli, who was born in this doomed place, has produced a bitter fictional report centered on a village that hangs like an abandoned bird's nest on a waterless escarpment between the Apennine Mountains and the Adriatic. His story, in translation at least, is as stiff, ill-fitting and yet appropriate as a peasant's wedding suit...
...pulp or dipped in hot wine. They hang about for days at the edges of fields hoping for jobs. Their priest begs lentils from door to door. On the Feast of St. Francis, the townspeople leave a hoarded egg white and the thistly cardoon as an offering. As Novelist Rimanelli spells it out, America with its fabulous giobbe (jobs) offers the one hope of earthly release from a doom of sweat, petty theft, envy, slander. For peasant poverty here has not made for nobility of soul-these people are tougher than the brass-hearted Normans of De Maupassant. Unlike...
This gruesome little melodrama could be forgotten had not Novelist Rimanelli, with more sincerity than art. compelled the reader to believe that he too has been one of the hungry Mediterranean aborigines on the harsh hillsides where tourists never go. As a commuter between continents, Rimanelli chose an apt title for his book from a text that he attributes to an 18th century merchant: "These people of the South have upon them the mark of original sin, a curse of Satanas. Whence poverty, invasions, the Bourbons, Jesuits, cholera and all the ills that afflict the spirit and the flesh...
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