(Italian Edition)

Review: Set in the poor villages of the Tuscan countryside
in the immediate aftermath of WW II, Carlo Cassola’s most celebrated novel exposes the betrayal of a generation
by the emerging order of the new Italian republic. Mara, the young-girl protagonist of “La ragazza di Bube” (“Bube’s Girl”), becomes engaged to a young partisan and hero of the anti-fascist resistance, Bube (pronounced Boo-bay), who confusedly continues his armed struggle against fascism when his political party, the Italian Communist Party, is embarking on a politics of compromise and collaboration with the emerging petit-bourgeois class. In a remarkable sequence of criminal violence, Bube kills the son of the man who killed a comrade. Mara must then decide whether to move on to a life of forgetting and reconstructing or remaining faithful to Bube, who will spend fourteen years
in prison. Either choice will result in a diminished
life, but one may be more moral than the other. Mara chooses the path of dignity and of commitment
to her generational tragedy, which is to have fought for social justice and to have been denied. Published in the late 50′s, Cassola’s book came under attack by left critics: they called the book “reactionary.” It is nothing of the sort. Far from condemning Bube’s actions politically, Cassola
asks why the Italian Communist Party undereducated
potential leaders like Bube to be unaware of the complexities of the forces uniting to defeat it. Nor has Cassola a word of kindness for the way the western allies first used the communist resistance and then persecuted it and hounded it out of power–in Greece, Italy, and France.  Intellectually probing readers will gain an understanding into the forces that really shaped the history of the 20th century: the relentless attack on the idea of a socialist alternative for society.  

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