History: A Novel

Front Cover
Knopf, 1977 - Fiction - 561 pages
The central character in this powerful and unforgiving novel is Ida Mancuso, a schoolteacher whose husband has died and whose feckless teenage son treats the war as his playground. A German soldier on his way to North Africa rapes her, falls in love with her, and leaves her pregnant with a boy whose survival becomes Ida's passion. Around these two, other characters come and go, each caught up by the war which is like a river in flood. We catch glimpses of bombing raids, street crimes, a cattle car from which human cries emerge, an Italian soldier succumbing to frostbite on the Russian front, the dumb endurance of peasants who have lived their whole lives with nothing and now must get by with less than nothing.

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About the author (1977)

Prolific and highly successful, Elsa Morante distinguished herself as a novelist, short story writer, and poet. The Marxist critic Gyorgy Lukacs hailed Morante's early House of the Liars (1948) as "the greatest modern Italian novel," but it was Arthur's Island (1957) that brought her international fame and an independent income. Her great financial triumph was, however, History (1974), which was the first Italian novel to be marketed with high-pressure promotional advertising, making use of publisher, mass media, and political party resources to push sales up to 600,000 copies in less than six months. Morante married Alberto Moravia in 1941, and they separated in 1962.

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