The Communist
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A unique political coming of age story, now in English for the first time.
An NYRB Classics Original
Walter Ferranini has been born and bred a man of the left. His father was a worker and an anarchist; Walter himself is a Communist. In the 1930s, he left Mussolini’s Italy to fight Franco in Spain. After Franco’s victory, he left Spain for exile in the United States. With the end of the war, he returned to Italy to work as a labor organizer and to build a new revolutionary order. Now, in the late 1950s, Walter is a deputy in the Italian parliament.
He is not happy about it. Parliamentary proceedings are too boring for words: the Communist Party seems to be filling up with ward heelers, timeservers, and profiteers. For Walter, the political has always taken precedence over the personal, but now there seems to be no refuge for him anywhere. The puritanical party disapproves of his relationship with Nuccia, a tender, quizzical, deeply intelligent editor who is separated but not divorced, while Walter is worried about his health, haunted by his past, and increasingly troubled by knotty questions of both theory and practice. Walter is, always has been, and always will be a Communist, he has no doubt about that, and yet something has changed. Communism no longer explains the life he is living, the future he hoped for, or, perhaps most troubling of all, the life he has led.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Communist's loyalty to the cause deteriorates in Morselli's rich and engrossing novel. In 1958, sent to Parliament in Rome as a representative of the Italian Communist Party, Walter Ferranini begins to question his beliefs. Son of an anarchist turned railway engineer, Ferranini grew up in the Reggio region of Italy in the 1920s, worshipping Sacco and Vanzetti and passionately studying biology. His father's early death ended his formal education and turned him into a laborer, and his subsequent involvement in the Spanish Civil War necessitated escape to the United States, where he became seduced by American life, "the sweetness and the rage" of it. The disintegration of his marriage to Italian-Irish-American Nancy, a budding nationalist, sent Ferranini back to Italy, where he became a dedicated and effective labor organizer, useful enough to the party to be elected to Parliament. But there, Ferranini a rigorously honest autodidact is shaken by a series of encounters, first with a younger man who thinks the Communists have become corrupt, and later with party officials who warn him to end his relationship with the married Nuccia. An article he writes about the inherent violence of labor, claiming that "biology certifies that there is no getting away from the struggle for life," finally threatens to bring upon Ferranini the wrath of the party he has so devotedly served. Morselli's characters debate Marx, but are never mere mouthpieces. His tale of a man whose certainties are destroyed will resonate with readers of any political persuasion.
