One Stricken Corner

One Stricken Corner A LIGHT FOR FOOLS (256 pp.)--Natalia Ginzburg--Duff on ($3.95).

Mussolini is mentioned only a few times in this fine novel, but it would not have been written without his help. Not since Carlo Levi's notable Christ Stopped at Eboli (TIME, Mays, 1947) have the Italian people in,fiction .worn so authentically the shabby halter of despair that the Duce imposed on them.

The book begins just before World War II, when most Italians could see nothing ahead but bigger doses of totalitarianism or castor oil. The old ones, like Heroine Anna's father, at least can look back to a past which they helped to make. The young ones subsist either on Black Shirt parades or else on inner revolt and total frustration. In her daydreams, motherless Anna, still a child, sees herself on the barricades, rifle in hand, or dashing across the roofs with Black Shirts in pursuit. But she is soon surrounded, not by revolution, but by personal tragedy. Her gentle brother commits suicide rather than go to war. Anna herself is sordidly seduced by a rich youngster, and saved from abortion and disgrace by an old friend of the family, a shabby, middle-aged salesman, who marries the 16-year-old girl out of kindness. He alone in the book walks upright like a man, and yet he knows that life in a prison is not improved by banging one's head against the walls.

Though he once traveled the world, Cenzo Rena now lives in his native village and tries--in vain--to help the slowly starving peasants, enslaved as much by their own ignorance as by the corrupt Black Shirt police sergeant who tyrannizes the village. The climax comes with World War II. When Italy's Jews are scattered in exile to the southern villages, Cenzo and other villagers openly aid them. For such acts of mercy, Cenzo is eventually shot by the Nazis, standing at the wall alongside the Jew he helped.

Author Ginzburg* has firmly portrayed one stricken corner of 20th century life without whining self-pity or tiresome indignation. But pity and indignation assail the reader: that is Author Ginzburg's triumph, and she achieves it without raising her voice.

* An Italian whose un-Italian name derives from her first husband, a Russian-born professor and anti-Fascist who died in a Nazi jail.

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