The Pontine Marshes, south of Rome, have long preoccupied Italians. Before his murder Emperor Nero had contemplated the clearing of this diseased swampland, with its deadly malaria and other health risks. Throughout the centuries ambitious plans were devised. Even Napoleon wanted to drain it. But it was the dictator Benito Mussolini who finally achieved the great dream of settling the region and having it farmed.
He accomplished this partly through the largest forced internal migration in Italian history: 30,000 peasants from northern Italy were ordered to leave their smallholdings and native villages and move to the south, which they regarded as a foreign country, to build a canal and channel the excess water.
Antonio Pennacchi's boldly engaging second novel, which has been longlisted for the 2015 International Impac Dublin Literary Award, could be read as graphic social history. It is this to some extent – Pennacchi is meticulous about dates and cross references – but it is also lively and funny. The Mussolini Canal is an earthy story of underlying seriousness, told with gruff bluster by a narrator possessed of an astonishing grasp of his family's story – which also happens to be that of his country.
In a brief introduction Pennacchi makes clear that, although his sprawling Peruzzi clan is fictitious, many of the events in which they are caught up were shared by countless living families. That said, no one who reads the book is likely to forget this group of larger-than-life individuals, headed by Grandmother, a beauty in her day. Grandmother once even caught the roving eye of Mussolini himself, who had to content himself with fixing her harrow.
Grandmother is the matriarch. Her common sense, acquired from her peasant brothers, balances the vagueness of her handsome consort, Grandfather. He is a carter who once, as a young man, responded aggressively out of nature to a random blow inflicted on his hapless horse. The attack outrages Grandfather, who spends much of the rest of his life calmly sitting in the local tavern, particularly on the days his hardworking wife gives birth to each of their 17 babies.
“All my grandmother’s children were born by day, not even one by night, because the wine-shop was shut then. And all at home, with my grandfather safely out of the way . . . ”
Early in The Mussolini Canal the narrator imposes his personality by making it clear he is prepared to tell the story, his way. "I don't know why you should want one, but if indeed you do want a blow by blow account I can give you one – I have nothing to hide now that so many years have gone by – and everything I'm telling you is the pure unvarnished truth. But at this rate we'll never get anywhere. If you want to be around to hear the end of the story, I'll have to skimp on surplus details. If I tell you that they did such and such a thing, then that's what they did, you'll just have to believe me, otherwise we'll just have to let the whole thing drop. I'm not inventing anything; at most my memory may be faulty."
His recall is rarely in doubt. The narrative proceeds apace with staggering fluency, all filtered through an emphatic, conversational style that remains consistent and never falters into impersonal reportage. Judith Landry’s translation conveys a sense of a prickly personality in control of his material, one who is able to digress but is none too keen on interruption.
Pennacchi’s prose is plain and functional, descriptive without straining for literary effect. The facts are there, and much of the history is known, yet he appears intent on telling it as it was perceived by ordinary people living in poverty.
The novel spans the two World Wars and is far better on the second, particularly the Italian involvement in Africa. But the narrator doesn’t engage in patriotic rhetoric. He merely tells what happened as the characters are faced first by socialism and then by the rise of fascism.
Family oral history
It is a book without heroes, without even much of a plot. It unfolds as an oral history featuring the men and women of the Peruzzi family, some of whom went to fight, largely because they had to.
“After three years of war, Italy was on her knees,” the narrator says of the Great War. “I’m not just talking about hunger, food shortages and so on. I mean that by now there was hardly anyone left to be sent to battle. So they had to call up mere boys, the last class, the class of 1899, including my Uncle Pericles, who was eighteen. ‘Just a lad’, my grandmother would say, ‘still wet behind the ears.’ ”
The introduction of Pericles, one of the major characters in a novel full of originals, is lightly handled. Pennacchi sketches in his lively cast; no one is intensely developed. He doesn’t set out to read their minds but allows their actions to flesh them out for the reader in a fast-moving story that doesn’t favour introspection.
Many of the names appear to have been chosen with deliberate playfulness. Pericles is no orator, yet, without being particularly heroic, he is a brave survivor and ultimately emerges as a kind of Odysseus. In a similar way his nephew, the aptly named Paris, finds his Helen of Troy in his aunt, the wife of Pericles.
One of the big set pieces concerns an act of arson. Long before the enforced move south the Peruzzis are established sharecroppers, and straw, to them, means money to buy food. The narrator’s exasperation, never far from the surface, makes this clear.
“Sorry, what’s that you said? Losing a straw-stack isn’t the end of the world? But we were peasants, we weren’t blacksmiths. Straw was meat and drink to us, it was our wealth, not just a by-product.”
Enemies set fire to a stack. The Peruzzi clan leaps into action. “Now all my uncles, young and old alike, had jumped out of the windows, and the other branch of the family were giving them a hand . . . The straw- stack had gone up in flames. What they had to try and do now was save the rest.”
Tempers flare throughout the novel, and all the while new characters are introduced and the extended family grows. Elsewhere, historical figures have walk-on parts. Aware that he has a captive audience, the narrator is generous with such asides; he also satirises the power shifts dictating the changing relations between Hitler and Mussolini. Life is different when the Peruzzi family moves south, but the characters stay the same.
There are obvious echoes of One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Grapes of Wrath, and even slight hints of The Tin Drum, but most of all Pennacchi's vivid, candid and large-hearted narrative balances the domestic with the international.
As the narrator announces: “Heed me, I have a story to tell.” And he certainly does.
