The Decameron #1.5/10: Boccaccio for Dummies

Boccaccio (anticipating the 1970s roadie look, natch)

At the risk of offending more critically-attuned sensibilities (I feel I must apologize in advance to the likes of Amateur Reader and our good friend Emily but not to those hordes of silly bloggers who insist on calling "the classics" a "genre"), it seems to me that one's appreciation of a story really only boils down to two things: what does the writer have to say and how does he or she say it?  Everything else is fluff...or worse, "theory."  Although I've begun my own reading of The Decameron fully expecting to enjoy its stories on their own as entertainment, I'm such a dummy that I'm not sure yet what Boccaccio will have to say during the course of the work or how he will say it.  Will he be didactic, a total trickster, or a totally "didactic" trickster like his 14th-century contemporaries the Arcipreste de Hita and Chaucer?  Complicating matters, I have some basic questions going in (How important is the plague as a backdrop?  Why did Boccaccio break with poetry to set these stories down in prose?  How was a work of this size disseminated in a manuscript culture?) that even a freshman in a survey class could probably answer for me after a couple of sections.  Why share this with you here?  First, I hope to be able to answer these questions by the end of this project--thinking out loud now should help me remember better later. Second, it gives me an excuse to cite a wonderful sounding title (Guido Almansi's 1975 The Writer as Liar: Narrative Techniques in the Decameron) that has turned up as a result of my usual hastily-conducted researches.  Perhaps Almansi will be of assistance with some of these preliminary questions.  In the meantime, I'm now done reading 15 of the 100 stories in The Decameron, having just finished enjoying the infamous tale of Andreuccio da Perugia whose red light district-visiting/tomb-raiding exploits are much more "instructive" than anybody really has a right to expect.  Hey, have I told you lately what a riot this guy Boccaccio is?

The Decameron #1/10

"No one will ever find out, and a sin that's hidden is half forgiven."  (The Decameron, 47)

I'd read the prologue and the "First Day"  from Boccaccio's Decameron (1353) before, but I read them again this week in preparation for this post.  A couple of things stood out.  First, like the unreliable narrator in Juan Ruiz' nearly contemporary Libro de Buen Amor (c. 1343), it's sometimes difficult to know when Boccaccio should be taken seriously and when he's just putting you on.  For all the talk about offering solace and instruction to his readers, for example, the Florentine lays his cad card on the table with nuggets like the following: "So in order that I may to some extent repair the omissions of Fortune, which (as we may see in the case of the more delicate sex) was always more sparing of support wherever natural strength was more deficient, I intend to provide succour and diversion for the ladies, but only for those who are in love, since the others can make do with their needles, their reels and their spindles" (3).  While this would appear to be the medieval equivalent of a frying pan joke, Boccaccio actually privileges women in terms of the composition of his cast.  "I shall narrate a hundred stories or fables or histories or whatever you choose to call them, recited in ten days by a worthy band of seven ladies and three young men, who assembled together during the plague which recently took such a heavy toll of life.  And I shall also include some songs, which these seven ladies sang for their mutual amusement" (3).  With zero background in the is he or isn't he a proto-feminist squabble, I look forward to evaluating Boccaccio's take on gender issues as I slowly make my way through The Decameron.  Secondly, whether Boccaccio's writing about the plague was based on his own eyewitness testimony or on the descriptions of others (translator G.H. McWilliam suggests it was the latter), it provides an extremely jarring backdrop for the storytelling sessions to come.  "It did not take the form it had assumed in the East," he writes on page 5, "where if anyone bled from the nose it was an obvious portent of certain death.  On the contrary, its earliest symptom, in men and women alike, was the appearance of certain swellings in the groin or the armpit, some of which were egg-shaped whilst others were roughly the size of the common apple."  Given this emphasis on the ravages of the Black Death in the "introduction" that precedes the storytelling marathon, the lighthearted nature of the first day's stories that follow provides quite the segueway.  A Jew who converts to Christianity despite the evil ways of the Pope and his clerics at Rome, a "money lender" who thinks his way out of a verbal trap laid for him by the sultan Saladin, and at least one abbot who likes the sexual position of woman on top star in the first series of ten stories about eloquence and ingenuity.  Will the horror of the plague and humor walk hand in hand throughout The Decameron or will the humor eventually win out?  I'm betting on the latter, but feel free to let me know what you think if you have a guess or an answer of your own.  In the meantime, I'm enjoying this mightily thus far!

Camilleri vs. Gadda, Damn It!

The Shape of Water [La forma dell'acqua] (Viking Penguin, 2002)
by Andrea Camilleri (translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli)
Italy, 1994

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana [Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana] (NYRB Classics, 2007)
by Carlo Emilio Gadda (translated from the Italian by William Weaver)
Italy, 1946 & 1957

Whilst the Jane Austen-and-Brontë sisters wing of the US blog mafia might lead you to believe that no new literature of note has been published outside of the United Kingdom since about the middle of the 19th-century, I'd like to spend a few moments on a pair of 20th-century Italian novels anyway. Please bear with me. After a long wait to sample one of his highly-touted Inspector Montalbano mysteries, I finally read Andrea Camilleri's surprisingly gritty The Shape of Water (the first in the Montalbano series) in a couple of sittings recently. It was a good taut weekend read, well-written, with appropriate nods to fellow Sicilian scribes Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Leonardo Sciascia, but it seemed like more of a high-octane genre workout to me than anything special. I mean, I'd read another work of his in a minute if I needed something to while away the time while traveling, but for right now the most impressive thing about Mr. Camilleri as an author is his undeniable resemblance to cable TV icon Junior Soprano! I finished Carlo Emilio Gadda's That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana a day later, a bit of misleading symmetry on the book-finishing front since I'd started the novel a month or so prior to The Shape of Water and I can't think of any actors that Gadda even remotely resembles. Although the Milanese Gadda's halting, deliberately digressionary style made it a lot more slow-going a reading experience than Camilleri's bullet train of a crime caper, the narrative difficulties were way more than worth the extra effort required as this brooding, metaphysical tale of a burglary and a subsequent murder in an upscale 1927 Roman apartment building gradually revealed itself to be the literary equivalent of a stunning panorama of the Eternal City at the moment when the fascists were coming into power. While Gadda didn't finish the novel in a way that any fans of old-fashioned literature would ever appreciate, his arresting way with words ("History, past-mistress of life" [299]), his mischievous interior dialogues, and the infamously abrupt ending evoke a sense of modern malaise that feels real enough for me. An underrated classic: that is, if any work can be considered as such when praised by both Italo Calvino and Pier Paolo Pasolini. (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Camilleri

Gadda

"He didn't think, he didn't believe it opportune to think of asking anything, either about the new niece or the new maid. He tried to repress the admiration that Assunta aroused in him: a little like the strange fascination of the dazzling niece of the previous visit: a fascination, an authority wholly Latin and Sabellian, which made her well-suited to the ancient names, of ancient Latin warrior virgins or of not-reluctant wives once stolen by force at the Lupercal, with the suggestion of hills and vineyards and harsh palaces, and with rites and the Pope in his coach, with the fine torches of Sant'Agnese in Agone and Santa Maria Portae Paradisi on Candlemas Day, and the blessing of the candles: a sense of the air of serene and distant days in Frascati or the valley of the Tiber, taken from the girls drawn by Pinelli among Piranesi's ruins, when the ephemerides were heeded and the Church's calendars, and, in their vivid purple, all its high Princes. Like stupendous lobsters. The Princes of Holy Roman Apostolic Church. And in the center those eyes of Assunta's, that pride: as if she were denigrated by serving them at table. In the center...of the whole...Ptolemaic system; yes, Ptolemaic. In the center, meaning no offense, that terrific behind." (That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, 10-11)

The Day of the Owl

The Day of the Owl (New York Review Books paperback, 2003)
by Leonardo Sciascia (translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver)
Italy, 1961

"'Who is it?' asked the conductor, pointing at the body. No one answered. The conductor cursed. Among passengers of that route he was famous for his highly skilled blaspheming. The company had already threatened to fire him, since he never bothered to control himself even when there were nuns or priests on the bus. He was from the province of Syracuse and had had little to do with violent death: a soft province, Syracuse. So now he swore all the more furiously." (The Day of the Owl, p. 10)

Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989) is often described as a crime writer, which I suppose he was, but I get the feeling that that label is as limiting and meaningless as calling Borges a short story writer. In his 124-page novella The Day of the Owl (first published in Italian as Il Giorno della Civetta and also translated into English as Mafia Vendetta), Sciascia does indeed write a story that takes a shocking murder as its starting point--but the mystery has to do with the reasons for the cover-up as much as the solution to the crime itself. The essential details are as follows. In a small Sicilian town, a man is shot dead in the middle of a crowded piazza as he attempts to board an early morning bus. Despite the presence of many potential eyewitnesses, nobody is willing to step forward to explain what they saw for fear of potential mafia retribution. A mainland carabinieri officer temporarily stationed in the area, the wonderfully-drawn Captain Bellodi, attempts to figure out and eventually resolves the motives for the initial killing as well as the subsequent ones that inevitably follow, but both his investigation and the pursuit of justice itself are constantly thwarted by a Sicilian culture that he's only gradually beginning to understand. Bellodi's status as an outsider from Parma allows Sciascia, himself a Sicilian, to comment on the captain's frustrations from both sides of the north-south cultural divide. With prose that is both psychologically astute and often unexpectedly funny, this sociological perspective on Sicily circa 1961 adds an extra dimension to an already-interesting police procedural narrative--making this almost too good to be true in the entertainment department. A splendid read. (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Leonardo Sciascia

(1989 NY Times obituary here)

La sinagoga de los iconoclastas

La sinagoga de los iconoclastas [La sinagoga degli iconoclasti] (1999 libro de bolsillo)
por J. Rodolfo Wilcock
Italia, 1972
ISBN 84-339-3009-5

Leí este libro para un curso sobre la literatura latinoamericana después del boom, pero no estoy seguro todavía si es una novela, un libro de cuentos, o qué. Ningún problema. Wilcock, un argentino que se trasladó a Italia cuando tenía unos treinta años, ha escrito algo que se parece a un museo zoológico de locos, soñadores, y otros fracasos humanos. Aunque no puedo decir si Sinagoga es el eslabón perdido entre Borges (Historia universal de la infamia) y Bolaño (La literatura nazi en América) hasta que lea las otras dos obras bajo consideración, agradezco la audacia y la idiosincrasia de la visión de Wilcock. En vez de un hilo narrativo "normal", dentro de estas páginas hay 35 biografías más o menos inventadas. Aunque todas no son igualmente interesantes, la inmensa mayoría de ellas contiene momentos de genialidad y un mordaz sentido del humor. Véase la entrada sobre Aaron Rosenblum, el utopista que quiso "devolver el mundo a 1580" (p. 23), o la entrada sobre John O. Kinnaman, el excavador que visitó Sodoma en busca del féretro de la mujer de Lot pero sólo encontró "una cantidad considerable de columnas y pirámides de sal" y la casa de Abraham con su nombre grabada en la superficie de una piedra (p. 87), para dos ejemplos que son atípicamente "típicos". Divertido.

• Wilcock, J. Rodolfo. La sinagoga de los iconoclastas. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1999.

J. Rodolfo Wilcock

La Nación (BsAs) tiene dos artículos interesantes sobre Wilcock:

• "Juan Rodolfo Wilcock: la felicidad del poeta" (1998)
• "El país de Juan Rodolfo Wilcock" (2003)

The Leopard

Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] (2007 paperback)
by Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Italy, 1958
ISBN 978-0-375-71479-5

"Tancredi and Angelica were passing in front of them at that moment, his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other's. The black of his tailcoat, the pink of her dress, combining formed a kind of strange jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die." (Di Lampedusa, 225-226)

Of the four books I've read so far for the Back to History Challenge, The Leopard is both the first novel and the only text consciously chosen for its status as a classic of world literature. It didn't disappoint on either count. While nominally concerned with a 19th-century Sicilian prince, Don Fabrizio di Salina, who foresees the old aristocratic order and way of life coming to an end with the annexation of Sicily and unification of Italy, its graceful prose and penetrating behavioral insights elevate it into something much more profound than that. Although most of the posthumously-published novel concerns events that take place in 1860, the closing chapters move forward fifty years while descrying an epic arc that seems due less to the literary machinations of the author and more to the inexorable hand of fate guiding the characters' lives. You don't have to know anything about Garibaldi or the Risorgimento to appreciate the Prince's concerns, and Di Lampedusa--himself a Sicilian prince writing nearly 100 years after the main events in question and basing his fictional Don Fabrizio on a real-life great-grandfather with the same name--does a masterful job of describing the essential "otherness" of Sicilians in relation to their cousins on the mainland. With characterizations much more vivid and fleshed-out than what you might expect from such an old school novel, don't be surprised if the sense of loss and the perfume of death that permeate the latter stages of The Leopard haunt you when you're done reading it. An outstanding work worth all the accolades it's earned over the years.

• Di Lampedusa, Giuseppe. The Leopard (translated by Archibald Colquhoun). New York: Pantheon Books, 2007 [1958]. (http://www.pantheonbooks.com/)

Giuseppe di Lampedusa, 1896-1957

The Baron in the Trees

The Baron in the Trees
(Il Barone Rampante)
by Italo Calvino
Italy, 1957

I didn't know where Calvino was going with this until about halfway into the novel, but it didn't really matter much since his prose is so effervescent even in translation. A shaggy-dog story about a 12-year old baron, Cosimo, who takes to the trees for the rest of his life after resisting his parents' orders to consume a nasty plate of snails, this half-farcical/half-profoundly astute "memoir" penned by the baron's infinitely more-grounded younger brother, Biagio, uses this unlikeliest of vantage points to cast a cockeyed glimpse at the role of self and society in "the age of Voltaire." If the eternal tug of war between idealism and compromise sounds like grim reading to anyone just out for a quick page-turner, rest assured that Calvino kind of follows in Cervantes' footsteps in sending his willfully-stubborn protagonist out on a series of highly-entertaining adventures that will take him out to sea to fight Turkish pirates and all the way into Spain to meet another "tribe" of tree-dwelling nobles in exile from their Granadan home. While this idiosyncratic approach may require more acquiescence than usual on the part of the reader, those who give in will be rewarded with cameos from Diderot, Napoleon, and Voltaire himself in this love letter to storytelling from one of its acknowledged 20th-century masters. Bravo!(http://www.harcourtbooks.com/)