Alessandro Manzoni
I promessi sposi

Premise

Saturday afternoon, I was getting ready to go out with T. (our first outing together) and discuss a bit of math rock before evening arrived - curfew set for 7 pm - when I read the review of "Moby Dick" on Debaser and the comment from the reviewer Bartleboom, whom I publicly thank for the esteem. I then phoned T. saying I had a stomach ache, so we wouldn't meet, and I decided to write a review on "I Promessi Sposi" by the well-known Lombard writer Alessandro Manzoni (or should we say Verri?), who lived in the 19th century.

I already know that many readers will turn their noses up and say to me, "But how @#!? can you have already read 'I Promessi Sposi' at only fourteen years old - fifteen in March - when such a book is mostly passively read by young Italians in the second year of high school or, for those who do the classics like you, the fifth gymnasium?!?!?!? Further proof that you are someone else (our former reviewer Paolo)."

It is not so, because, regardless of the much-debated question about my identity (it seems absurd to me that once a girl writes here she is mistaken for a male, but that’s your problem. You particularly give the impression of separating femininity from intelligence!!!!!!), you should know that my mom, a well-known reader not just of fashion magazines, advised me this summer to read Manzoni so as not to let school ruin it for me and to form my own opinion.

So.

The plot

Given the long premise, I won't go on too much, especially since you all really know it: two young provincials from Como intend to marry, but a Spanish nobleman stationed at the lake fancies her and tries to ruin everything, with foul means (without fair ones). This leads to adventurous events involving a mix of characters, culminating in an end where the good win and the bad lose, though redeemed at the point of death.

Martina's Decalogue

In short. It's not that I liked this book too much. I will try to lay out ten reasons, even if to be evil the decalogue is insufficient. Anyway:

1. totally unrealistic story, despite Manzoni's claims. In reality, the bravi wouldn't have gone to Don Abbondio, but would have directly killed Renzo before the end of the description of the branch that "turns south" (like Gomorra);
2. very stereotyped idea of women: I don't know if you've noticed how they range from the saint (Lucia), to the frivolous (Nun of Monza), to the crazy (Donna Prassede). Not even Lucia's mom comes out well (in my opinion, she would have been better off with Don Rodrigo);
3. simplistic and populist idea that the people, the poor, are oppressed by the rich and powerful, by the invaders who cater to their interests on their backs. Sure, in the scene of the bread riot, it is shown that the people can also become a mob and create disasters, but that's not enough. Reality was perhaps more complex: both in the Spanish 1600s and Austrian 1800s (so much so that not everyone in Milan was happy with the end of the Lombard-Venetian and Austrian domination, see Lega). It's not that outsiders came in to ruin everything;
4. unpleasant idea of the average man crushed by laws and the state organization, almost as if to say that civil society is better than its representatives such as politicians. E.g., Renzo vs. lawyer Azzeccagarbugli. True, these laws were long and confusing, but one cannot just come from the village to the city with two capons (though the scene where the chickens fight without knowing they will be killed is brilliant!)
5. tedious events. The trick of mixing a simple base story with many sub-stories that intersect has already been criticized in "The Lord of the Rings": more conciseness! It’s not that to write a novel I have to put in hundreds of pages - something only Russians manage well in practice - I can also be concise;
6. as with Tolkien, there is overall a certain manichaeism in the characters: very good, very bad, with final redemption where everything more or less resolves. Meh. It doesn't convince me: for example, the fact that Lucia, poor and unfortunate, never entertained a thought about Don Rodrigo. Or that no one asked Renzo: do you want Lucia because you like her or because you are stubbornly resisting leaving her to the Spaniard?
7. the use of language: the anxiety to create an elegant language for educational purposes distorts what little realism there was in the book (essentially the landscapes and the description of daily life or secondary characters). To say, Renzo and Lucia speak like two intellectuals when they were clearly illiterate, and especially, there is no gap between linguistic registers! Basically, the characters, regardless of social extraction, speak the same way. Manzoni should have mixed languages: have Renzo and Lucia speak in the Como dialect, Don Rodrigo in Spanish, the priests in Latin, etc.;
8. the role of religion: here I touch a delicate point. On Wikipedia, I discovered that Manzoni was a Jansenist, practically not a typical Catholic but had some Protestant influences that led him, in essence, to say: man can do everything but in the end, it is God who decides how it ends, saves or condemns you. Which shifts the discussion to grace and its randomness. The synthesis is this: in reality, the characters of the book are puppets, they don't decide on their own, but they are very helped by luck, by something supernatural that we cannot control. Which means the person is not responsible for the things they do: e.g., Don Rodrigo is not bad in himself, but it is destiny that makes him bad, and redeems him in the end. The novel is too focused on this underlying idea. Which leads me to say that
9. there is also a morbid attraction to the world of the religious: from the priest with no vocation but with a cassock out of necessity (Don Abbondio), to the one who became such almost for expiation and neurosis (Fra Cristoforo), passing through the saint (Borromeo, ancestor of Lavinia!!!!!) and the sanctified in life (Innominato) seems a bit excessive this attachment to tormented figures. It gives too much importance to the priestly world, to the social and cultural centrality of priests. Meh;
10.  unpleasant, unpleasant, unpleasant the educational function that, between the lines, the novel would like to have. I don't know, but I think a certain Italian mentality comes from here, or is accepted as physiological in novels like this: being passive in the face of ugliness hoping for the miracle; being convinced that the mediocrity of the average man can win against the cunning and the powerful while remaining average men; asking the church for help when in difficulty; forgiving even the worst criminals as long as they repent in the end. I don't know, it doesn't convince me.

The rating.

This time, I prefer not to give it because I see it triggers controversy. It would tend to be two. Nevertheless, I save the descriptions of the places and characters, a certain skilful reconstruction of the atmospheres of the seventeenth century.

Rather than reading it, watch Nocita's 1989 TV series, with a superb Sordi as Don Abbondio, and if I remember correctly Renzo Montagnani as Donna Prassede's husband, who then dies of too much intellectual refinement. It cuts all the useless parts. As for great nineteenth-century novels, opt more for Verga and, as I am told, De Roberto de "I Viceré". Anyway, in Italy and Spain, we are not excellent with novels.

If you really love Lake Como - like George Clooney and me: I love Bellagio - and can't live without novels set there, I'm told Andrea Vitali's are very valid. If he read, I'd gift one to T. to make up for my stomach ache.