Neapolitan Chronicles

February 5, 2018
Spanning fiction and reportage, this rueful collection (first published in Italy in 1953) depicts the wretched state Naples was left in after World War II. Ortese portrays the human dimension of the city’s poverty through short stories about the sacrifices a mother makes to afford eyeglasses for her daughter (even as the child’s aunt advises, “It’s better not to see the world”) and the sorry conditions of one family’s Christmas celebration. The melodramatic particulars of those stories, though evocative, are less memorable than the observations included in nonfiction reports like “Involuntary City,” about families squatting in a bombed-out granary, and “The Silence of Reason,” a dispatch on the writers of Naples whom Ortese once counted as peers. In 1945, she remembers, “we wanted to remove the finely carved tombstone that lay on grave and find out if in that rot anything organic remained.” In fact, she finds that the “barren, desperate art” that resulted from this inquiry did little to elevate the fortunes of her former
colleagues; instead, they have become depressed, spiteful, and “intellectually humiliated.” Taken together, Ortese’s articles and stories serve as a provocative showcase of how a city once associated with “ecstatic happiness... deteriorated into vice and folly.”