Twenty-Three Days of the City of Alba : Stories

by Fenoglio, Beppe

• ISBN13: 9781586420406
• ISBN10: 1586420402
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2002-04-01
• Publisher: Zoland Books

Summary

TWO THOUSAND ITALIAN partisans took the city of Alba on October 10, 1944, and two hundred lost it to the Fascists on November 2. Among the bedraggled fighters in this historic siege was Beppe Fenoglio. He later made his debut as a writer with this collection of short stories based on his experiences in the Italian resistance movement. The year 2002 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the collection's original publication in Italy and its first appearance in English. Fenoglio's spare, direct prose still strikes with the staccato-like force of rifle fire. He creates an intimate, unvarnished portrait of his fellow partisans: an ill-equipped, malnourished mix of trained soldiers, eager farmboys, and broken old men. Antiheroes, they all but bumbled their way into playing a crucial role in the Allied victory of World War II, then returned home to nurse their wounds. Fenoglio's cast includes the drunken thief Blister, who opens fire inside a house for a glass of grappa; Hector, a partisan commander who becomes an unemployed mama's boy following the war; and Raul, an intellectual like Fenoglio, who joins the partisans out of ideological commitment, only to find scant room on the battlefield for ideology.

Author Biography

BEPPE (GIUSEPPE) FENOGLIO was born in Alba in 1922. He left the University of Turin in 1943 to train as an officer in the Italian army and later joined the partisan resistance movement. After the war he began his career as a novelist (Johnny the Partisan, Ruin, and A Private Matter) and translator of British and American literature, including works by D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, and Shakespeare. He died in 1962.

Table of Contents

Translator's Foreword	vii
The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba	1	(16)
One-Way Ticket	17	(16)
The Trick	33	(6)
The Debut of the Partisan Raoul	39	(18)
Old Blister	57	(14)
Another Wall	71	(20)
Ettore Goes to Work	91	(20)
That Old Girl	111	(6)
Green Water	117	(4)
Nine Moons	121	(12)
The Smell of Death	133	(8)
Rain and the Bride	141