South - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Mario Fortunato was born in Cirò, Calabria, Italy. For three decades he worked as a literary critic for the Italian current affairs magazine L’Espresso and continues to work as a columnist for the German daily paper Süddeutsche Zeitung . He has been a member of the Italian Cinema Commission of the Ministry of Culture and the International Advisory Board of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, is a founder of the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia, and Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London. He is also a former director of the Antonio Ratti Art Foundation and former columnist for The Guardian and Le Monde . In addition to writing novels, he has translated into Italian works by Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. South is his first novel to appear in English. Julia MacGibbon has translated works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including Marta Barone’s Sunken City . She lives near Rome. Klappentext Originally published in Italian as Sud in 2020 by Bompiani, Firenze-Milano. Leseprobe Prologue   Where are they all? Tamara, whom only her husband called Mara, the Lawyer, with his sidekicks Rosa and Cicia, Maria-la-pioggia (“Maria-the-rain,” heaven knows why) and Maria del Nilo (heaven knows why)? Where are the old Notary, with his accidental offspring, and the old Pharmacist, who kept a violin hidden in his wardrobe? And their wives, who were so very different—one shy and gloomy, the other brusque and decisive—and yet both as tiny as children. Where are they? And Peppo from the posthouse, and Nina, who loved ghosts, Emilio, who didn’t start talking until he was twenty, Ciccio Bombarda, the chauffeur without a driving license, and Luigi, known as “Sciammerga,” with Gemma his wife, Virginia his lover, and the others who never had names. Where are those who belonged to the past historic—up in the hills, cool breezy summers, paths lined with hawthorn, like a page out of Proust but without any aristocrats—just farmers, the huddled masses, and a scattering of bourgeoisie? And those who inhabited tenses less remote—on the coast, by the sea, all of it humid and smelling of fish: a noisier penury that in the space of a few years would transform itself into ’ ndrangheta ? Where are they all? They once populated the recesses of his dreams. By night he had seen them file by like paper figurines: he had watched them mutate from shadows into bodies and from bodies into statues, and every statue was a story. By day, though, they disappeared into that patchy, inconclusive fog of which memory is made—faces crumbled, words stole away—and he didn’t try to stop them or batten them down. Valentino left at the end of the seventh decade of the twentieth century. He was a boy, and like all boys, he made sure not to look over his shoulder. The world was such an inviting place to dive into. Added to which, Tamara, in other words Mara, in other words his mother, had told him and had repeated until she was blue in the face that he must not stay there, with them, in the south, because it was a land of barbarians and he had better escape to some distant place of safety, as far away as possible. Thus—except in the recesses of his dreams—he slowly forgot them all, discovering that—contrary to popular belief—oblivion is delightful. And for almost forty years he experienced the joy of never quite being himself. He sped through his youth and then the years of his manhood with the efficient strides of those who carry only hand luggage. The windblown hair of those who are free to live anywhere and reside nowhere in particular. Rome, New York, Rome again, London, Milan, Rome again, Berlin, and, between one waypoint and the next, journeys far and wide, down into Africa, or into Asia, racking up miles and joie de vivre. Meanwhile, little by little, in the oblique and furtive style so typical ...

Product details

• Authors: Mario Fortunato, Julia MacGibbon
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 16.05.2023
• EAN: 9781635422047
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-204-7
• No. of pages: 384
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 202 mm x 25 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature