Friday, July 3, 2015

Ennio Flaiano: The Short Cut




“I knew that one has to take short cuts as they are, not argue with them.” – Ennio Flaiano, The Short Cut

Of the many surprises that Italian literature has offered during my explorations, Ennio Flaiano’s The Short Cut (Tempo di uccidere, 1947) is among the most unexpected, addressing an unusual area of Italian experience: Mussolini's military incursion into Abyssinia in 1935-36. Winner of the inaugural Strega Prize, Italy’s highest literary award, The Short Cut stands out not only as an accomplished mid-20th century Italian novel, but also as one of the finest novels about imperialism I’ve read from any country.

Essentially The Short Cut recounts a transgression during the “fog of war” and the attempts of the narrator, an unnamed lieutenant in the Italian army, to wrestle with what he has done. AWOL from his battalion in a valley where the East African jungle gives rise to stark tableland, the lieutenant, seeking a break as well as treatment for a toothache, takes a short cut to the nearest sizable town. Losing his way, he encounters a young tribal girl bathing in a pool and watches her until she becomes aware of him and quietly exits the pool:

The operation was very simple; first she had to slip on a tunic and then wrap herself in a wide cotton toga. She still dressed like Roman ladies who had reached here or the borders of the Sudan, following the lion hunters and the proconsuls. “A pity,” I said, “to live in such different ages.” She perhaps knew all the secrets which I had rejected without even examining them, like a paltry legacy, in order to content myself with boring trite truths. I looked for knowledge in books and she had it in her eyes, which looked at me from 2,000 years ago like the light of certain stars which take that time to be picked out by us. It was this thought, I think, that made me stay. And then I could not distrust an image. 

Lost, exhausted, in pain and aware of the powerlessness of the native population before the “signori” who’ve invaded their land, he forces himself on the girl in a drawn out scene in which he validates his actions by what he interprets as the girl’s own desire. The two remain together until a few nights later, shooting at a wild animal, the lieutenant finds that a shot has ricocheted and wounded the girl. To ease her suffering as well as to escape culpability - in essence burning a village in order to save it - he kills her and hides the body.

It may seem that I’ve already given away most of the plot, but all of the above occurs in the first chapter. Flaiano’s interest lies in the lieutenant’s Raskolnikov-like rationalizations in the wake of his crime. Since this is a novel of imperial exploits, the lieutenant’s struggle also involves his ability – or inability – to comprehend the people whose land he occupies. A dance ensues between himself, his fellow Italians, and the native population, including an elderly man and young boy connected to the woman the lieutenant has killed. As he becomes increasing paranoid and more inclined to further his escape through additional crimes, the novel becomes a nearly picaresque set of adventures of a man lost within his reverberating thoughts, attempting to make his way back to Italy and to a wife rapidly becoming little more than a picture in a frame. Flaiano enhances the lieutenant’s moral miasma by leaving him suspended in time (his watch breaks), in place (his perambulations go in circles), and even in language, his connection with others underscored by the few words he and the natives can share and by the letters from his wife that gradually lose their legibility from being carried through the harsh African landscape.

Africa, for the lieutenant, is a place of contradiction. At best it represents openness, adventure, power, freedom from the confines of life back home:

Here…there was the advantage of feeling oneself in virgin country – an idea which does have a certain fascination for men who in their own country have to use the tram four times a day. Here you are a man, you find out what it means to be a man, an heir of the dinosaur’s conqueror. You think, you move, you kill, you eat the animal you surprised alive an hour before, you make a brief gesture and you are obeyed. You pass by unarmed, and nature itself fears you. Everything is clear and you have no spectator other than yourself. Your vanity emerges flattered.

Yet Africa is also “the sink of inequities…one goes there to stir up one’s conscience.” Alternately enraptured by the land and oppressed by its dangers – the enemy, crocodiles and other wild animals, heat, jungle, desert, disease – the lieutenant comes to know it as “the Infectious Empire.” Occasionally his perceptions of colonialism’s problems are more direct and cynical. Coming across an old man burying the dead in the remains of a destroyed village, he observes:

The Zouaves…had come on horseback to do this quick job; they were passing that way and it didn’t take long to burn two or three straw huts. And on the other hand the Zouaves remembered what the Asaris had done in Libya, they too paid by the same master, because this is one of the elementary secrets of a good imperial policy.

The Short Cut proved an excellent follow-up to Alberto Moravia’s Contempt. It employs a similar unreliable distance between the narrator’s view of himself and the reality he inhabits, and an overarching structure of a man questing to return to the wife from whom he is estranged. Like Contempt’s Riccardo Molteni, the lieutenant scours his conscience for a way out while grasping for any moral wiggle room and attempting to justify himself in terms of an almost institutional love for his wife: “…all that I have done, did I do it for her or did I do it for myself. That is all I want to know.” With regard to the other woman whose life he has taken through accident and intention, he revisits his actions, each time creating more morally abject nuances that might disentangle him from his mess:

I had stooped to this woman more in error, I felt, than sin. She did not give to existence the value I gave it; for her everything would have come down to obeying me, always, without asking anything. Something more than a tree and something less than a woman. But these were foolish fantasies which I hazarded to pass the time; other hands were stretched out to me from the radiant distance, other smiles invited me to return; and I would be wise to forget that night.

Through the lieutenant - hardly the worst of the Italian characters in the novel - the entire enterprise of Italy’s empire-building ambitions in East Africa is laid bare as sham, as a callous and doomed attempt to impose an uncomprehending system on a people the Italians can’t and won’t understand, even when the attempt rebounds in deadly ways. Like the lieutenant’s failed effort to find an expedient return to civilization, his interactions with natives, marked by fractured communications at the edge of language, serve to increase distance rather than shorten it.

I found the The Short Cut to be a superb novel, reminiscent of the best of Graham Greene and, in its thriller-like portrayal of a man on the run, of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male. Had it been the only thing Flaiano wrote, it would have assured his fame. But Ennio Flaiano’s reputation has already been guaranteed. Though his name may not be immediately familiar, one surely knows the titles of the films he wrote for directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and especially Federico Fellini: Rome: Open City, La Notte, I Vitteloni, La Strada, Juliet of the Spirits, Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, and 8 & ½, among others. That Flaiano’s only novel is such an impressive work hardly comes as a surprise.


Perhaps the cover artist thought it was Green Mansions?...

17 comments:

  1. Great review, Scott. I was going to ask whether the novel contains a broader message about the folly of colonialism, but you've answered it in your closing comments. (The second quote is very telling, too.) It reminds me a little of Katie Kitamura's novel 'Gone to the Forest' (although the latter is possibly closer to Coetzee's 'Disgrace' than the Flaiano).

    Your review reminds me that 'Rome, Open City' has been sitting on my DVD rental list for a little while. I wanted to catch it at the BFI when they screened it last year but couldn't make into London at the time. I'll have to bump it up the pile.

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    1. Thanks, Jacqui. I thought it was quite a good book, and I imagine it had quite an impact when first published in Italy. I don't know the Kitamura novel, but will check it out.

      Open City is a great (if rather grueling) film. How fortunate you are to have BFI; I've been a couple of times just to browse the bookstore, and each time I've been envious of the schedule. By the way, since writing this post I've discovered that there's an Italian film version of The Short Cut - starring Nicolas Cage, of all people.

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  2. Superb commentary on this one Scott.

    The plot as you describe it sounds eerily familiar to so many real life accounts of war time incidents. These incidents are tragically very common.

    Based upon your commentary it sounds like the author has infused the realistic account with a lot of meaning and has thrown out lots of ideas along the way.

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    1. Thanks, Brian. The themes and plot will be familiar, as it's rather a universal story told many times. But I thought it a fine example of that kind of novel. It's a great portrait of a person whose conflict with his own actions leads to increasing complications and dissolution, while at the same time throwing light on the larger conflicts of which he is a part.

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  3. I'm a retired professor of Contemporary European Literature with a focus on Italian. I certainly appreciate your efforts to make this rich stream of material more available to an English reading audience. Keep it up!!!! It goes without saying that I enjoy your reviews, comments and book choices.

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    1. Thank you so much for your kind words and encouragement. Mine is obviously an amateur effort, but I have been greatly impressed by these works and eager to share my enthusiasm for them. It's been a tremendously fruitful exploration; I could not have imagined that a work like The Short Cut even existed.

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  4. I'd never heard of this so thanks for the review. I've only just scratched the surface of Italian literature--although that said, a collection of Verga short stories just arrived on my doorstep.
    Love that sordid cover. It wouldn't look out of place next to the Charles Williams series

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  5. btw who are the translators for the two versions shown?

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    1. Guy - I thought of you while reading this novel and think you would like it. And of course when I saw your Charles Williams covers I immediately thought of the "sordid" one here - if not the same artist, then certainly the same school.

      Stuart Hood translated the top edition; I suspect the bottom one is his as well, but don't know for sure.

      I look forward to reading your thoughts on Verga's stories. I haven't written about him yet, but have now read two collections of stories and his novel I Malavoglia, and relished all of them.

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  6. I have yet to read a winner of the Strega which I did not adore. The books I've read for that prize still resonate within me, I'll pull up a memory from seemingly out of no where so often and dwell on the image, or the thought, the author conveyed. At some point, I would like to read all the Strega winners.

    How interesting that this fell upon the heels of Contempt, so to speak. Finding threads that connect the literature we read is so fascinating.

    I mentioned in a return comment to you (imagine, I do reply to comments this summer!) that I would be up for a reading of a title in Severina if you had one you especially liked. To me, they are all unfamiliar; hence my interest in reading one together with you and others who may feel inclined.

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    1. I didn't set out to read winners of the Strega award, but after stumbling upon three in a row I've starting perusing the list and now have another in progress. I'm curious to know which ones you've read.

      Just left a response to your Severina proposal. I might well be up for that!

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  7. The Strega Prize winners I've read are Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi, Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini, I'm Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti and a nomination for the prize entitled Swimming to Elba by Silvia Avallone. They are emotional and gritty to me; I loved them.

    As for your idea of Two Serious Ladies, wonderful! I've never read it, and of course our library doesn't have it, but I found a copy on Amazon. I'd be glad to put up an invitation if you'd like to read it again with me and others. Have you a preferred month?

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    1. Thanks for the info on the Strega books - I'll give them a look.

      There's a new edition out of Two Serious Ladies with introduction by Claire Messud (I haven't read it). But you can also get the book inside the collected works of Jane Bowles, My Sister's Hand in Mine, which contains quite a bit of other good stuff.

      How's October for a group read?

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  8. I located a copy of Two Serious Ladies not for my kindle, as I thought, but at least to be delivered in paperback by Amazon in August. I hope it has Claire Messud's introduction which I didn't take time to notice as I was so glad to finally find a copy.

    think October would be a marvelous time, and I'll compose an invitation soon. Already I'm looking forward to it!

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    1. Great - only - I spent some time this afternoon going through Severina, and I don't see Two Serious Ladies mentioned anywhere! Either I somehow missed it or it must have been mentioned in another book. We can still read Two Serious Ladies; one can imagine its being on the list of books that do appear in Severina, which is quite long. There's a little something for everyone.

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    2. I looked for Two Serious Ladies in Severina as well, and couldn't find it. But, I figured that was okay. I'd like to read it all the same, and it's especially fun when there's a book to read with two or more. I just won't mention that we found it in Severina. ;)

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