Available in paperback (not sure about Kindle / Audiobook), first published 1963 in Italian, 140 pages
Knowing nothing about either this short book or its author I bought it on a whim in a bookshop in
Cambridge and later learned that Fenoglio is considered to be one of Italy’s major post war
writers….Ital Calvino called this the ‘book of his generation’. Most of Fenoglio’s writings are
concerned with his experiences with the resistance movement fighting as a partisan in WW2 Italy.
Most of his work was published posthumously following his death at 40 in 1963.
After the Italian armistice in 1943, the Wehrmacht invaded and Fenoglio who had been at officer
training school at the time joined the partisan militia in January 1944. The book uses his experiences
to inform the story of a student who joins the partisans in the Piedmontese hills and follows a
complicated love affair, obsession and jealousy, capture and recapture, set against the backdrop the
brutal conflict between the Italian partisans and Fascists in the autumn and winter of 1944.
It’s a complicated and mysterious book with its two themes melded into each other…neither a full
blown romance nor a searing indictment of man’s inhumanity but something a lot more subtle. It
would also provide an incentive to look into this segment of a global conflict and the activities of
resistance groups in general which seem to be under represented in popular history writing just now.