Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

March 15, 2020
The sins of the fathers are visited on the children in this pensive multigenerational novel. Argentinian writer Pron, who now lives in Madrid, travels east to Italy to locate his newest story. It opens in 1978, the era of the Red Brigades, but immediately looks back to the end of World War II, with a one-time fascist writer recalling the death of a comrade: "When we found Luca Borrello's corpse, his eyes were open and he was looking up at the sky, as if a moment earlier Borrello too had been appreciating that it was a splendid day." Borrello had been taking part in a conference of fascist writers even as Mussolini's Nazi-backed Republic of Sal� was collapsing--says another participant, "We wanted new ruins we could dedicate our poems to"--and he was hiding a secret: He'd been sheltering a member of the resistance from roving bands of SS troops. A generation later, the son of the rescued fighter seeks to comprehend the attraction of fascism by interviewing survivors of that literary generation, a story whose denouement reaches into the present. Pron reveals each detail deliberately, letting the mystery build, and he populates his pages with real historical figures and events ranging from the birth of futurism at yet another writers conference to the killing of the conservative politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. His story is part suspense novel, one that explores several puzzles: Why would Borrello have saved a putative enemy, and who killed him in turn? What happened to the texts of a poet who enlisted in Mussolini's army, and how did he die? It is also part historical investigation, reminiscent of the recent work of the Spanish writer Javier Cercas in its insistence on getting at hidden truths. A skillfully constructed exploration of past events that many Italians would just as soon forget.

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March 30, 2020
Pron (after My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain) delivers a dry study of political extremism and its intersection with literature. Pietro Linden is an Italian political activist involved with the assassination of his former fascist college professor in 1977. Though he is ordered to lie low by his government liaison, Linden, who had been secretly monitoring the professor’s movements, picks up some books the professor had ordered and begins reading them, then reaching out to the authors of the books: futurist-fascist literati who were at their publishing peak in the 1940s. Linden conducts a series of exhaustive interviews with four of the authors regarding their political activism and connection to the death of author Luca Borrello at the 1945 Fascist Writers’ Conference. During these interviews, Linden discovers Borrello’s antifascist allegiances, and reckons with the hypocrisy of 1940s futurist-fascist literary movements and the amoral and blind passion that often accompanies extremism. As Linden begins to question his own political leanings, Pron weaves a surprising and complicated web involving Linden’s antifascist, resistance fighter father who was held prisoner during a government purge in 1944, and Linden’s son, the aimless protestor Tomasso, who lives in poverty and hopelessness in 2014. Disappointingly, Pron’s intriguing frame is rendered lifeless with too many secondary characters. This is a dense, frustratingly erudite take on art, politics, and “writing literature into life.”

May 1, 2020
In this ambitious, erudite novel, Argentine writer Pron revisits similar themes to those in his English-language debut, My Father's Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain (2013): mystery, murder, and a fragmentary narrative. This time, it's Italy, 1977. Pietro Linden, a member of an unnamed activist organization, tails a fascist Fascist professor through the streets of Turin, until the latter's untimely demise. When Linden retrieves the departed professor's book order from a local shop, it leads him to interview attendees of a Fascist writers' conference that took place in Mussolini's Republic of Sal� in 1945, at which the author Luca Borello died under mysterious circumstances. What results is a fascinating fictional take on the inseparable developments of fascism and modernity, and the intergenerational transformations of art and politics. A lengthy appendix includes biographical sketches of 60 real-life writers and literary figures who appear in the novel, and readers with the patience to undertake Pron's exhaustive sentences and page-spanning paragraphs will surely appreciate the masterful intertwining of personal and historical storytelling, as well as an uncomfortable resonance with today's geopolitical theater.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)