Ignazio Silone
Fontamara

LA RECENSIONE

Every time I read Silone, I feel at peace because it conveys the tranquility of those Sundays in the countryside, in September or early October, when it should start getting cold but doesn't, and everyone is out enjoying the sun and the last illusions of summer.

Silone conveys a decayed, vanished life, in places where a semblance of it still persists; it is indeed only a semblance because it's merely an enclave, a soap bubble, somehow intact in the stream of progress. To tell the truth, Fontamara is already a relic in a world that rejects it, or rather, exploits it as long as it can without truly caring. Fontamara is a relic and a symbol: it is in Abruzzo but could be anywhere because, as the author himself says, all poor peasants are essentially alike, whether they are European, Arab, American, Chinese, and they understand each other at any latitude "I must say it, but to whom? If anyone will ever understand, it will certainly be another like me."

And you can also react to the nineteen hundreds, be Bernardo Viola, a lion-hearted giant who doesn't reason badly, the protagonist of the story, if there is truly a need to find one. As far as I'm concerned, Fontamara is primarily a choral novel, despite Bernardo standing out among the other characters; he is just a part of the whole, which wouldn't exist without the other inhabitants of Fontamara, their stories, and their way of seeing life.

You may be wondering what the novel is about, in a nutshell: about the inhabitants of a small village who one day are deprived of electricity, about a domino effect that overwhelms a small, mocked, exploited, trampled people, about their awakening ("What to do?") that modernity does not coincide with progress. The ancestral life swept away by the new that overwhelms: Fontamara is an epic novel about the wretched end of a worldview, it's a disoriented look, a black, silent scream: a tombstone on a part of us.