Word: vittorini
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Vittorini has won them acclaim in the U.S. Rome, not Paris, is the capital of a new generation of postwar U.S. expatriates, who this time celebrate not what they have lost but what they have found...
...much in the grace of Mussolini that I was never permitted to speak on the radio, to work in the theater or in the cinema, and from 1933 until the liberation, I was deprived of a passport, while all the other writers-for example, [Alberto] Moravia and [Elio] Vittorini-had them . . . In 1940 . . . I was recalled to the army as a war correspondent. Because of my articles from the Russian front . . . I was arrested in the Ukraine by the SS. I was one of the three Italian officers who organized the Italian Army of Liberation which fought with the Allies...
...critics are pretty much agreed that Elio Vittorini is a novelist to reckon with. In Sicily and The Twilight of the Elephant even brought him a plug from Ernest Hemingway: "One of the very best of the new Italian writers." His U.S. publishers believe that The Red Carnation, too, is "a fine example of Italy's incredible literary renaissance." But pinning down just what is good in Vittorini's novels takes a little more saying...
This is one of the oldest stories in the world, and Author Vittorini, like most of those who have retold it, has failed to avoid seamy sentimentality. His prostitute, aflame with love on one burner and cooking up illicit narcotic deals on the other, seems to Mainardi to be "The Madonna on Horseback"; but to the reader she is just a pipe dream. When the cops put her away at the end of the book, it is no more poignant than a decision by the gas company to lock up the meter...
...Where Vittorini excels is in matters that are more real than romantic. He brings to life the hostel in which Mainardi and his fellow boarders eat, sleep, gossip, quarrel, and exchange adolescent dogma on everything from Homer to modern politics. He gets down pat the earnest remarks that bubble from sophomoric lips ("I absolutely agree with the ancient Greeks"). He knows how hard it is for any boy to keep a secret, and how the fears and fond hopes of a father and mother cling like leeches to a boy's guilty skin. He knows just how rumor rules...