Deviation

July 9, 2018
This powerful and provocative novel from D’Eramo (Nucleo Zero), published in Italy in 1979, recounts the WWII experiences of the 18-year-old daughter of Italian fascists, based on D’Eramo’s own past. Lucia leaves home in February 1944 to volunteer at a German chemical plant. She is arrested for participating in a strike, then repatriated to Italy, but rather than rejoin her parents, she turns herself over to a Nazi patrol, not really believing the things that are being said about the atrocities the Nazis are committing, as they don’t mesh with her upbringing. Imprisoned at Dachau, she is disabused of that notion. She eventually escapes during an air raid while cleaning sewers in Munich as part of a forced labor crew. By war’s end, she has made her way to Mainz, where a bombed-out wall collapses, leaving her paralyzed. In December 1945, she returns to Italy in a wheelchair but “non doma” (not crushed), and goes on to become a mother, academic, and writer. Readers see Lucia calming terminal patients, staring down a police dog, shedding identities like snake skins, all while formerly repressed memories of the war keep bubbling up in her narration. D’Eramo vividly conveys the cruelty and wretchedness of war. An excellent translator’s note from Appel clarifies the sometimes confusing chronology of events and the mix of memoir and fiction in this audacious novel.

July 15, 2018
Italian writer D'Eramo recounts her experiences in Germany in the closing months of World War II.Falling in the same subgenre as Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt, D'Eramo's novel is really thinly fictionalized autobiography. When her father, a devoted fascist, removed her family to the Alps following the collapse of Mussolini's regime, D'Eramo threw herself into the fascist cause, volunteering to join a labor corps in Germany. After she had a chance to study the involuntary members of her unit, Russians and members of political resistance groups among them, all of whom mistrusted her as a true believer in the cause, she decided to head home in disgust with the Hitler regime only to be sent in a labor detail to Dachau. While working to rescue survivors of a bombing in Mainz, a wall collapsed on her; she writes that a German soldier was hit in the head by a flying brick and then, after asking to see his children, "slumped to the ground, killed instantly." Told sometimes in the first and sometimes in the third person, D'Eramo's account addresses not just wartime experiences, but also her subsequent life in a wheelchair, paralyzed by the accident and dependent on drugs; some of the episodes she recounts are as hellish as anything she experienced in the labor camps, as when, writing of her addiction to Valium, she notes, "How could I have forgotten that it was the basic component of the truth serum used by the Nazis in Dachau?" In her dreams she may be running, fleet-footed, toward or away from that crumbling wall in Mainz, "truly like the others, thrashed, spat upon, just like them," but her realities are somber and rueful, the disillusionment of a 19-year-old girl who survived into old age but never forgot that youthful indiscretion. The book resembles Malaparte's in some of its hallucinatory aspects, but it also recalls work as various as Iris Origo's War in Val D'Orcia and Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Castle to Castle.Though a minor contribution to the larger literature of World War II, a strange, heartfelt account of someone who served a role few would confess to.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 1, 2018

Published in Italy in 1979 and an international best seller Americans missed, this work features fascist-raised young Lucia, who decides to prove that those ridiculous stories about Nazi atrocities are all wrong. A trip north to volunteer as camp labor shows her the hellacious truth. Soberingly, a fictionalized account of the author's own experiences.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.