Volume 4, Number 6 · April 22, 1965
Novels, Italian Style
By R.W. Flint
The Smile on the Face of the Lion
by P.M. Pasinetti
Random House, 341 pp., $5.95
My Troubles Began
by Paolo Volponi
Grossman, 231 pp., $5.00
Why shouldn't the first serious bilingual novels about the international high life of post-war Italy be written by a Venetian aristocrat teaching comparative literature at U.C.L.A.? It seems eminently reasonable. Italophilia of recent decades has had an endearingly promiscuous quality—owing in varying degrees to the glamor of international chic, the lingering post-fascist euphoria, to the extreme dullness of the old Italian artistocracy, composed as it is of bits and pieces of England, France, and now America—so that gifted aristrocrats like P. M. Pasinetti are obliged to make their careers from the ground up. Some evocations of Venice in Pasinetti's first novel, Venetian Red, are as fruity as anything in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria books, yet Pasinetti, the jacket says, 'was born and grew up in Venice, where his father was a prominent physician and his mother belonged to the Ciardi family of Painters.' After college at Padua, he did highbrow journalism, worked on screenplays for Antonioni and Rossi, studied at Oxford and Berlin, taught in Germany and Sweden before settling at U.C.L.A. where he is also an editor of the excellent Italian Quarterly.
Review, 1603 words
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