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Adele's Blog
Adele Annesi: Posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2012 7:27 AM
Award-winning Italian novelist Elsa Morante captures the events of an era in a journal style that grounds her seminal work of long fiction, History. The novel opens with a kind of year in review and an ominous citation that the atomic century has begun. In each of the dozen or so entries that set the stage for the novel, the focal point is the war that is coming to every part of the world, and will continue to come like a great tide that ebbs and flows but never ceases.
Morante's persistent selection of global events provides an invasive backdrop for the novel. Unlike some Italian writers who tend to exclude the rest of the world, Morante opens the flood gates. From the setting comes a mood, a sense of inevitability, as if there is nothing for the characters but to be caught in history's great wake, thinking, hoping, for awhile they might survive only to be engulfed.
Global events and their effects on people provide context, and the second draft of a novel is just the place to layer the work with details that create a realistic setting, and inform the characters and their choices. For more on Elsa Morante's work, visit Steerforth Press. |
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