In the first year it sold, in Italy alone, a record 800,000 copies (at a time when a successful novel rarely sold more than 100,000 copies).<\/p>\n
The book literally spellbound its readers.<\/p>\n
Morante insisted\u00a0that her publisher, Einaudi skip the hardcover version and go directly to paperback. She also decided to keep the price low, at 2,000 lire (then the equivalent of about $5), giving up significant royalties.\u00a0For the cover, she insisted on a detail from an iconic Robert Capa image of a dead\u00a0 antifascist during the Spanish Civil War. Under the photo, she placed the phrase: \u201cUno scandalo che dura da diecimila anni.\u201d<\/p>\n[\/aesop_content]\n\n\n[aesop_quote type=”block” background=”#FFFFFF” text=”#E87E2A” align=”right” size=”2″ quote=” \u201cA scandal that has lasted for ten thousand years\u201d ” parallax=”on” direction=”left” revealfx=”inplace”]\n[aesop_image img=”http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Copertina-Morante-1.jpg” align=”left” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]\n
To precisely which scandal is she referring to?<\/p>\n
When the novel was published in English in 1977, Morante was so upset that the American edition lacked a warning paragraph, that she tried to rectify it by consenting to a simultaneous edition for the Franklyn Library First Edition Society in which she wrote a long message to the members of FFE Society.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the original Italian Edition, this novel, under its title History, bears the following subtitle: A scandal that has lasted for ten thousand years. These words already define the theme which the novel then develops and orchestrates. […] Glancing through any summary of World History, one discovers immediately that the vast course of human events, despite its upheaval and unevenness, displays a landscape of obsessive monotony. Historiography, no matter how much it explores, finds everywhere the same, unceasing scandal. Remote or near, every human society is discovered as a tormented field, where a squad performs violence and a throng suffers it […]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n In Italy, the novel turned out to be a cultural and literary scandal, quickly dividing readers into those who hailed it as a masterpiece and those who objected to it on ideological grounds.<\/p>\n Before La Storia<\/i>, Morante had not published a novel since L\u2019Isola di Arturo<\/i> (Arturo\u2019s Island<\/i>) in 1957. While working on La Storia<\/i>, she did not give details to her publishers, husband, friends or colleagues except to say, \u201cI am writing a novel for the illiterate.\u201d The book in fact bears as an opening quotation a line from the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, \u201cPor el analfabeto a quien escribo\u201c (\u201cTo the illiterate for whom I write\u201d).<\/p>\n A second quotation from the Gospel of Luke, reads \u201c\u2026 thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes\u2026 for so it seemed good in thy sight.\u201d This verse introduces another theme of the novel: the wisdom, purity and redemptive power of children.<\/p>\n Paul Hoffman, writing from Rome for the New York Times<\/i>, reported:<\/p>\n \u201cFor the first time since anyone can remember, people in railroads compartments and espresso bars discuss a book\u2014the Morante novel\u2014 rather than the soccer championship or the latest scandal. The critics write endlessly about the meaning of La Storia and the reasons for the exceptional stir it is causing\u201d.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n No post-war Italian literary work had ever been as divisive. The only precedent on a smaller scale and involving exclusively a literary debate was Tomasi Di Lampedusa\u2019s posthumous The Leopard<\/i> in 1958.<\/p>\n Foreign publishers quickly began to buy the rights to translations. A Spanish publisher had advanced $15,000 before Franco\u2019s regime banned the book. In English, the rights were acquired by Alfred Knopf, who published the novel in 1977, in a translation by William Weaver, who at the time lived in Rome and was a close friend of Morante. Unfortunately, the translation was labored and almost broke their friendship.<\/p>\n Even the title was a challenge: La Storia<\/i> in Italian means both History and the story, and the ambiguity between these two meanings is an essential element of the work. In English it appeared as History, A Novel<\/i>, in 1977 as an Alfred Knopf hardcover, and was most recently re-issued in paperback by Steerforth Press in 2000.<\/p>\n By 1974, Italy, torn by ideological wars that followed the uprisings of 1968, was entering a time plagued by terrorism on the left and right, \u201cgli anni di piombo.\u201d The critical debate over History<\/i>, only thinly veiled the unsophisticated question that was being asked: Is Morante\u2019s novel left or right wing? Is it a new popular and proletarian form of narration or a reactionary bourgeois novel? In truth, no one knew where to place this novel with its anarchist non-violent thrust and its non-Marxist reading of history. As the critic Cesare Garboli recalled:<\/p>\n “The controversy spread to the press. The far left daily paper Il Manifesto, was bitterly divided. The weekly L\u2019Espresso organized pro and con polls among its critics. The weekly La Fiera Letteraria titled “Is it or isn\u2019t it a masterpiece?\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n[aesop_image img=”http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Fiera-Letteraria-1.jpg” align=”right” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]\n Among the many prominent Italian writers who at the time took a position against La Storia<\/i>, Nanni Balestrini, an experimental writer associated with the avant-garde movements Novissimi and Gruppo 63, saw the novel as a reactionary sanctification of poverty and suffering. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who from the mid-1950\u2019s had been a close friend of Morante and shared her desire to uncover the multilayered deception behind the promise of progress in the newly affluent Italian society, famously trashed La Storia<\/i>. Though he much admired the first 150 pages, he felt the structure did not hold:<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole novel is configured as a comparison between life and History: between one chapter and another of the novel (conceived as annals) there are brief inserts that summarize the objective historical events – from 1941 to 1967 written as a history manual. In the first part of the novel, this gimmick is extraordinary and I would say, “structural”, to the novel. […] Then the”effect” of the confrontation of life with history suddenly becomes lost and expires.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n After penning a negative review, Umberto Eco conceded:<\/p>\n \u201cPerhaps one day we will realize that History was only seemingly a novel aimed at a general public, while in reality, it is a very cultured, very meta-literary one, who knows…\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n La Storia is a multilayered novel of gargantuan ambition. One aspect, it seems to me, that has escaped critical attention is the centrality of the Race Laws of 1938. More specifically, the way the Laws impacted the children of mixed marriages, and in particular, those who \u2014 removed from direct contact with the Jewish Community \u2014 concealed their dark secret, without the relative comfort of sharing their fears and hardships with others. The female protagonist of the novel, as with the author herself, belongs to this category.<\/p>\n Morante describes the devastating sweep of history from the point of view of people whose existence has been reduced to a struggle for food and shelter. At the bottom of the diverse group we find a middle age school teacher, a single mother, a half-Jew, facing the brutality of the Race Laws with no recourse at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n[aesop_character img=”http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/lastoria\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/plume.png” name=”Credits” caption=”Image: Elsa Morante Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. 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\nMusic: W.A. Mozart, Rondo in A minor, K. 511, Claudio Arrau, piano” align=”right” force_circle=”off” revealfx=”off”]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"