Sometimes, you do need to be Italian to really ‘get’ Italian literature

My god daughter is having her 8th birthday this weekend, and so I am loading her up with chapter books so she can become more proficient at reading.

I doubt that the Muddle Headed Wombat I ordered will arrive in time, and I realised when I re-read Paddington Bear a few years ago that the sentence structure requires an adult to concentrate, so I will leave Paddington til next year.

So I bought a few anthologies of Enid Blyton books (as you do – or at least, as someone as non-PC as me will do).

I also have bought a nice hard back copy of Pinocchio, which really is a dark comedy for children, although I have my doubts that most people are familiar with the novel.

People will not be surprised that whilst I have read the novel, I am not all that familiar with the Disney animated feature. I happily admit that I don’t think that I have seen any of the classic Disney animated features, except for Fantasia.

I will say that the novel is far darker than the movie.

Let’s take the main supporting character in the movie, Jiminy Cricket, an anthropomorphised insect who dresses like some sort of Victorian era London spiv complete with top hat.

He has a much smaller role in the book, and lacks a name, and only occupies the space of chapter 4, which is 3 pages long. There is no possibility for the cricket to spend more page time in the novel because Pinoccio throws a hammer at him and flattens him.

See… much darker than the movie. But skimming my paperback copy of the novel right now, the energy and dark humour leaps off the page at me in a way which the eight or nine year old version of me might not have appreciated.

But to truly appreciate the sometimes dark humour in Italian literature, you need to have some sort of lived experience as an Italian, particularly as an Italian peasant. The struggle for survival is one which Italians find blackly, or bleakly, funny, as is the host of resentments and causes for envy amongst neighbours. As an ethnic Italian born in Australia from peasant ancestors, I am close enough to that mindset to ‘get’ it.

Aside Pinocchio, another example is Italo Calvino’s hero Marcovaldo, an uprooted peasant struggling to support his family in post war Rome. There is a scene where he finds a free feed (mushrooms if I recall), and he then ends up sick all night from it. It might not be funny to Marcovaldo, but to Calvino and his readers, it is indeed – the bleak humour that comes from understanding the struggle for survival.

Moravia perhaps is a little too sophisticated and bourgeois for peasant humour, but he too sometimes can be very funny in a way which an Italian perhaps would exclusively understand. HIs book of short stories, Il Paradiso, which consists of ten stories of a sexual nature narrated in the first person by female protagonists, is well worth appreciating. It is one of the few books of Italian literature which I have read in the original language, given my spoken Italian is better than my reading ability.