Scurati posed a vital question: “[H]ow might we find and maintain a new connection between that language and our own literary languages? One of the most interesting challenges of mass culture for contemporary fiction writers,” he continued, “is that it offers an ever-widening immaginario [a collective storehouse, so to speak, of the imaginable] that no longer refers to particular literary, national, or local roots. There must be a kind of competition between literature and this new globalized immaginario, which is expressed mainly via electronic media.” In Italy, Scurati noted, a fiction writer with activist inclinations might construe the meaning of political engagement as authors did “in Italy’s romantic and patriotic nineteenth century: namely, [as] a search for a truly populist art—one that maintains its integrity of expression while at the same time reckoning with a new and strange immaginario.”
Arguing for a new language for fiction—one that might attract readers living under what he saw as the dictatorship of breaking news—Scurati opined provocatively that no novel could be written today that is not a historical novel. What he meant was that in order to elude the moment-to-moment grip of the present, story-makers must devise fresh ways of making the past and the future genuinely intriguing—capable of prompting unexpected surprise and curiosity—and thus instructive, particularly with respect to a contemporary immaginario that isn’t fenced by national borders.
“I don’t consider pedagogy a bad word,” Scurati said in the same interview. “I’ve been the victim,” he explained, “of a powerful, surreptitious national pedagogy: commercial television [owned by Silvio Berlusconi]. This has been the case since the 1980s, when the self-styled leftist intelligentsia in Italy refused pedagogy altogether as fascistic. That false progressive culture is guilty of having delivered the most powerful pedagogic tool, television, to a new right wing that seemed (but wasn’t) disengaged ideologically.”
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Over the course of a career that has garnered multiple literary prizes, Scurati has written works of fiction—none translated into English—that range widely in subject and theme, yet are united by an imagination acutely sensitive to historical specificities.
His 2002 debut novel, Il rumore sordo della battaglia [The Muffled Sound of the Battle], republished in a new edition in 2006, deals with the advent of firearms at the end of the era of the condottieri during Italian Renaissance. The book testifies to Scurati’s long-standing interest in the language of violence in Western culture. Pursuing this interest with a different subject at hand, his 2005 Il sopravissuto [The Survivor], co-winner of the Premio Campiello, is inspired by the Columbine shootings in the United States, though its action occurs in an Italian liceo. The novel explores acts of “casual,” seemingly incomprehensible violence typical of our era.
Turning again to the past, Scurati published Una storia romantica [A Romantic Story] in 2007—a novel whose action unfolds in the nineteenth century, forty years after the struggle for independence and the unification of Italy. His 2009 Il bambino che sognava la fine del mondo [The Boy Who Dreamed the End of the World] shifts back to the present, placing the reader at the intersection of fact, fantasy, and fear. For its point of departure, this book makes use of a real-life event, a well-publicized, much-debated case of pedophilia in Belgium (which Scurati re-situates in an elementary school in Bergamo, Italy). The novel is narrated from the viewpoint of an investigative journalist who unveils the sordid facts as well as the distorting effects of the media, and is forced to revisit disturbing aspects of his own experience.
Like the past and the present, the future offers fiction-making possibilities for Scurati. He explores some of them in La seconda mezzanotte [The Second Midnight], published in 2011. The story takes place in the year 2092 in Nova Venezia (New Venice), a city transformed into a vulgar and violent superdome by its owner, a giant Chinese telecom company. In this novel as in Una storia romantica, Scurati presents societies suffocated by corruption and dissimulation. Within them, the resistance of a few isolated heroes lends sense to their lives. Il Padre Infedele [The Disloyal Father], published two years after La seconda mezzanotte, offers no heroes; instead, it signals Scurati’s incursion into the private realm of masculinity in crisis, with overt references to the author’s own experience. The novel reflects both the chaos of the present and the uncertainty of the future.
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Scurati’s most recent works of fiction tackle a large, tangled knot in contemporary Italy’s collective consciousness: fascism.
His 2015 novel Il tempo migliore della nostra vita [The Best Time of Our Life] takes its title from a phrase in Natalia Ginzburg’s essay collection The Little Virtues. The novel celebrates the morally adamantine life of Natalia's first husband, Leone Ginzburg, imprisoned by Italian Fascists and tortured and killed by German Nazis in Rome in 1944. As Scurati’s narrative makes clear, Ginzburg—an intellectual with no other weapon in hand but his pen—knew how to say no to fascism, and for this he was persecuted. His wife Natalia took care of their children while accepting her husband’s choices as essential. Her own writing was her sole and best means of escaping despair.
In this hybrid novel/biography using both first- and third-person narrators, Scurati interweaves Leone Ginzburg’s life with the obscure everyday lives of common people, represented (intriguingly) by Scurati’s own paternal and maternal relatives. With its epic sweep and the taut rhythms of its sentences, Il tempo migliore is a riveting book. At its end, the first-person narrator (clearly close to the author) envies both Ginzburg’s and Scurati’s families the “privilege” of living during “days of constant privation . . . that were nonetheless days of struggle, of pride, of human solidarity and family affection aimed at the future.” [All translated fragments as well as the book titles (of the unpublished works) are my translations.] The novel becomes an offering of sorts to Scurati’s own generation, the second after World War II, whose members appear fortunate and privileged (no wars, new technology, a lot of entertainment), yet feel confused and rootless. They are a metaphor, Scurati suggests, for Italy’s failure to unify itself under a flag of shared values—values such as empathy, straightforwardness, consistency, and self-respect, epitomized by the responses of Leone Ginzburg and his fellow anti-fascists.
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In 2019, Scurati's newest novel, M, il figlio del secolo [M, The Son of the Century], won Italy's most prestigious literary award, the Premio Strega. This work is the first in a projected trilogy of what he calls “documented” novels. In them, Scurati addresses a set of linked questions that have plagued Italy (and, by extension, Europe) for the past hundred years. How was it that at the start of the twentieth century, fascism took root so quickly in the minds and souls of ordinary Italians? Is it credible that after the end of World War II, fascism could be so quickly erased in their memories and substituted by anti-fascism? And how is it that fascism is surfacing again in the immaginario of many contemporary Italians?
To begin answering these questions, Scurati plunges deep into the life of Benito Mussolini, the man who contributed in such a determining fashion to the tragic story of Italy and Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. As Scurati recognizes, Italians’ memories of and attitudes toward Mussolini—marbled as they are with scorn and admiration, shame and pride, embarrassment and regret—remain perturbed and perturbing. Since Italians have yet to reckon fully with the legacy of il Duce, Scurati seeks to perform the unfinished rites, so to speak, so that the corpse can be properly entombed. The author considers this not only a personal duty he must fulfill in his capacity as a writer, intellectual, and teacher, but also a requirement of literature itself.
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The first volume of M presents the reader with a huge amount of documented material, on which, Scurati bases his depictions not only of the dictator himself but of fascism “at eye-level,” stripped of caricature and mythical lacquer.
As the novel’s copyright page states, in this narrative “facts and characters are not the products of the author’s imagination . . . every single event, character, dialogue, discourse . . . has been historically documented and/or authoritatively witnessed by more than one source.” M is thus a work of fiction that Scurati insists is utterly non-arbitrary in its presentation of events and characters who express the spirit of their times. They are steeped in a deep dissatisfaction with the past; most of them are full of a sense of impotence, instinctively inclined to violence, and ravenous for personal and national redemption.
Scurati examines how and why a bunch of returnees from the Great War along with a small minority of fanatical, angry men could not be stopped before getting their claws into Italy and bringing it, over the course of twenty tumultuous years, straight to complete disaster. He patiently retraces, step by step, how Mussolini began by sensing Italians’ frustration and fear, then presented himself as the sole, uniquely powerful leader who could and would “make Italy great again.” With order, discipline, and sacrifice, il Duce claimed, fascist Italy would get to relive the glories of the ancient Roman Empire.
Mussolini founded the Fasci di Combattimento—the Fascist Party-to-be—on March 23, 1919. Six years later, on January 3, 1925, he took full political responsibility for the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, leader of the Unitary Socialist Party (with a social-democratic orientation), who had denounced the elections won by the Fascists through fraud and violence. Those brief years are condensed in Scurati’s first volume, which is fragmented into dozens of short chapters, each titled with a character’s name and a date. Each chapter ends with citations from newspapers, letters, and public records (often from fascist archives), recapping events that have been rendered fictionally. An omniscient narrator who sometimes mutates into a first-person speaker—Mussolini himself—relates and comments on the action. The narrative’s pressing rhythm generates a palpable sense of immediacy, and the reader feels the same riskiness and uncertainty that Italians felt in the early 1920s—in a dark wood, the right way lost. There to save them is Mussolini, archetype of the modern populist. He speaks the language of ordinary people, repeats memorable catchphrases, asks simple rhetorical questions; he pushes for a direct dialogue with the masses, tickling them to unanimous consent or dissent, yes or no. He galvanizes individuals who want to forget their frustrations, and who perceive in Mussolini’s body language—stark and repetitive—the clear, resolute gesturing of a man who finally knows how and where to lead them.
Scurati convincingly conveys the extraordinary capacity of this leader—“one of the last great Italian inventions successfully exported abroad,” the author once noted sarcastically—who in the space of few years, by exciting or restraining the violence of his Fascist squads as he saw fit, is able to transform a politically incoherent movement into a disciplined, armed spearhead. Realizing that only by being the dictator of his party will he become the dictator of Italy, Mussolini turns the Fascist Party into a presentable-seeming container of secret organizations operating outside the law. He makes cynical use of both his squads and the Party, increasing his power by cultivating a popular consensus and playing upon on the hesitation, gullibility, and occasional connivance of the opposition, itself remarkably divided—ranging from conservatives to social democrats, socialist-maximalists, and communists. (The latter split from the Socialist Party in 1921, dreaming of the Soviet revolution to come soon.)
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After its publication in 2018, M jumped to the top of the best-seller lists in Italy, maintaining that position for several weeks. Since then it has been widely reviewed and has collected considerable praise, but also some harsh critiques—which often happens in Italy to literary fiction that sells more than the usual (small) number of copies, as in the case of Elena Ferrante’s novels.
Some fault-finding historians have reported clamorous errors, or have accused Scurati of misusing material culled from specialized academic studies. More accurate editing of the book would have taken care of mistakes that are mainly small slips—drops in the ocean of a roughly 800-page novel. The biggest knock to Scurati’s novel, however, has come from anti-fascist critics. When Scurati claimed to offer the first genuinely unbiased approach to Mussolini, his statement drew the attention of various fascists and far-right-wingers. This, said Scurati’s left-wing detractors, extended and enhanced Mussolini’s memory and recognition, just as the outsized M on the book’s cover did. According to these accusers, Scurati has unintentionally helped normalize the figure of Mussolini in a cultural and political climate in which the form of the message exhausts the message itself.
Reacting briskly to these critiques, Scurati insisted that M is the strongest contribution he could make to anti-fascism. Because he worked on the first volume for more than five years, he did not imagine that it would be published in a climate in which groups of self-declared Fascists and Nazis would overtly show their infamous symbols—and be tolerated and sometimes patronized by official authorities, local and national. Yet Scurati did know (and asserted, right from the start) that younger Italians and Europeans were and are largely ignorant about what happened in the first half of the twentieth century.
Moreover, when he launched his project, he recognized that the current indulgence (visible around the globe, but noticeably in Europe and the States) of strong leaders is a function of socioeconomic and political conditions similar in some key ways to those of a century ago. And one can readily agree with Scurati that if his book is bought by fascists or their sympathizers, or simply by people who don’t know anything about Mussolini and his Ventennio (the twenty years of Fascism between the two world wars), he has fulfilled his goal: to give people the opportunity to understand deeply the damage wrought by Mussolini.
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Lost in the chatter around M as a publishing phenomenon are observations about its literary qualities—in particular, its qualities as a novel.
To downsize il Duce without demonizing or mocking him, Scurati seeks to reveal what makes Mussolini an actual human—the man behind the superman mask he wore until his own violent end ripped it from him. This is the job of fiction, not research, and it requires the bringing-to-life of a variety of characters in addition to Mussolini: his intimates and enemies.
In M, the only real antagonist to Mussolini is Giacomo Matteotti, a moderate yet implacable opponent, not a revolutionary extremist. Matteotti’s murder stained the reputation and perhaps the conscience of Mussolini. Before World War I, Mussolini’s political fortunes had been entwined with the tormented story of the Socialist Party, and Scurati’s novel sheds light on the ambiguous relationship of the Fascist leader with various friends and enemies of his time—many of them Socialists, many his own age, and from the same region of Romagna.
Only two women appear onstage in any significant way in M, and each plays a supportive role in Mussolini’s life. Margherita Sarfatti—feminist, socialist, Jewish, married to an older man (also Jewish)—is spellbound by the aggressive, vulgar energy of the young Mussolini, a revolutionary Socialist before the war. She falls in love with him and becomes his mistress. The leader-to-be, a male predator (syphilitic as well), is insecure, frustrated, and married to the daughter of a peasant. He is attracted by Margherita’s refined education and her sophisticated Milanese salon, where she hosts young avant-garde artists. Through her, he gains access to a powerful political and social network.
Velia Titta, a young poet from a well-off Pisan family, marries Giacomo Matteotti after a two-year engagement. A moderate reformist persecuted during World War I for his anti-militarism and then a victim of the Black Shirts’ violence (because of his ceaseless opposition to fascism), Matteotti is brutally murdered. During their twelve-year relationship, Velia and Giacomo write hundreds of letters to each other—a tender dialogue that creates an intimate refuge for them. They are both aware of the tragic destiny awaiting Matteotti, yet Velia accepts her role as wife and mother, without complaint.
Sarfatti and Titta are completely different women involved with completely different men, yet they have something in common: they are strangers to the game of politics in their day—a game in which men alone can show their force. As this game of virility unfolds, the female characters’ self-limiting behaviors are tantamount to a kind of necessary surrender to the men they’ve allied themselves with. A deeper fictional investigation of their roles—through the eyes of the two women themselves—would shed more light on the contradictions that inform Mussolini’s private and public life. Scurati’s first volume in his planned trilogy introduces and begins to develop those contradictions vividly and compellingly. Readers may hope that the next two volumes will dig further, unveiling more of Mussolini’s features—as Carlo Gadda masterfully did in his Eros e Priapo (1945), a merciless caricature of il Duce’s narcissistic exhibitionism. Gadda’s book paints a portrait of Italy’s phallocratic society looking at itself, incapable of checking its need to self-venerate. That is a familiar problem today, and not only in Italy.
Can fiction help us deal with it? Scurati’s “documented” novels, particularly the last two ones dealing with the lives and times of Leone Ginzburg and Benito Mussolini, are the product of a profound respect for what fiction can accomplish. He believes that historical fact is a resource as valuable for the novelist as are intuition and insight, and he invites them into a potent narratological union. All historical fiction counterweights fact with imagination; Scurati pits facts against hunches, possibilities, fantasies, and assumptions, over and over again, to see what emerges. Then he invites us to do our own imagining. In his Mussolini project he has begun to generate a nuanced picture of a man whose capacity for violence was matched by an uncanny ability to manipulate his compatriots’ perceptions of reality, hence to create a new immaginario. Put differently, Mussolini forged another kind of narratological union, a deadly one. We need to know in as much depth as possible who this Duce actually was, and Antonio Scurati is doing his utmost to write the man back into life—making him live on the page as a warped yet brutally effective character, and an instance of a particularly destructive way of being human. Italian readers will not be the only ones in Scurati’s debt.
