Elliot's Reading week of 4/4/21: Guido Morselli

Guido Morselli’s posthumously published novel The Communist (written 1964-65, published 1976) has so much going for it: A smart novel in the contemporary/realistic vein about life and politics in post-war Europe, Italy specifically (set ca 1958), just the kind of book that I most appreciate! Plus, publication by the NYRB press; though NYRB often goes out on a limb and has published or republished a few duds, I’ll at least start reading almost anything from this press. Plus, the sad and unusual story of Morselli’s life: A well-to-do man, he retired in early middle age to his family acreage in a remote part of Italy and spent the 2nd half of his life - how Proustian! - writing, publishing a book on Proust and one other but leaving 9 novels for which he could find no home. Morselli shot himself to death in 1973 - and lo and behold, his work has been discovered, published, translated, and glowingly received. Who wouldn’t be curious? Yet, to put it bluntly, I wish The Communist were better; at least through the first half or so, which is as far as I’ll trudge, it’s the story of an middle-aged man devoutly adherent to the politics and ideology of Communism and a member of the party serving in the Italian parliament (Communism was viable force in post-War Italy). He is a near isolate, though he has a woman friend, with absolutely no sense of humor, irony, or even pathos. Much of the goings-on in the first half of the novel involve intra-party debates about now-obscure points of Marxist philosophy and the going’s on in the post-Stalinist era in the Soviet Union (these kinds of discussions and debates will be quite familiar to anyone who took part in leftist politics in the U.S. in the 1960s-70s, but that familiarity doesn’t make the going any more relevant today - not without the levity of humor or the insight of those living outside the enclosed circle of leftist jargon and ideology). I don’t mind that the novel feels quaint and dated, but I do mind that its belabored jargon and that the central character doesn’t seem to change, evolve, or struggle with his beliefs nor with hit constituency, co-workers, or lover. One interlude that brought some life to this novel, for me, was an account of the few years the eponymous Communist spent in the U.S. where he, improbably, married a wealthy, patrician woman in a marriage that, inevitably, foundered. More of interest might lie ahead for some readers, but not for me.