Dallas Public Library

The novice, a novel, Giovanni Arpino, translated from the Italian by Peter Green

eng

no index present

fiction

The novice

1357167

Giovanni Arpino, translated from the Italian by Peter Green

a novel

In this novel, which Montale hailed as 'a masterpiece of its kind', Giovanni Arpino tells an enigmatic and enthralling story, in a fast, rhythmic and fluid In this novel, which Montale hailed as 'a masterpiece of its kind', Giovanni Arpino tells an enigmatic and enthralling story, in a fast, rhythmic and fluid prose, of immediate grip on the reader. Against the background of Turin in 1950, all FIAT signs and trumpet blasts in the courtyards of the barracks, with the Po flowing swollen in the color of the earth, Antonio Mathis, a forty-year-old employee, a respectable man without quality, without courage and desires, lives closed in a senseless everyday life, between a girlfriend completely devoid of passion and futile, vulgar office colleagues. But for some months now he has been harboring an unspeakable secret within himself. On the platform of tram 21, he met the gaze of a young, small, white and pink nun, twenty years old, with whom he gradually establishes an ambiguous relationship, made of fears, expectations, chases, hesitations, omens of love, in a perfectly obsessive crescendo. Arpino makes Antonio Mathis speak personally. But it turns out that it is she, Serena, this is the name of the novice, to pull the strings of history, with an unshakable certainty of innocence, with a childish and peasant cunning that overturns her silence of months in the clinking talkativeness of a night. The young nun introduces into realism a vein of grace and mystery that goes beyond time, and that even today's reader will certainly know how to love