The Communist

by Guido Morselli, Frederika Randall (Translator), Elizabeth McKenzie (Introduction)

Overview

A unique political coming of age story, now in English for the first time

An NYRB Classics Original

Walter Ferranini has been born and bred a man of the left. His father was a worker and an anarchist; Walter himself is a Communist. In the 1930s, he left Mussolini’s Italy to fight Franco in Spain. After Franco’s victory, he left Spain for exile in the United States. With the end of the war, he returned to Italy to work as a labor organizer and to build a new revolutionary order. Now, in the late 1950s, Walter is a deputy in the Italian parliament.

He is not happy about it. Parliamentary proceedings are too boring for words: the Communist Party seems to be filling up with ward heelers, timeservers, and profiteers. For Walter, the political has always taken precedence over the personal, but now there seems to be no refuge for him anywhere. The puritanical party disapproves of his relationship with Nuccia, a tender, quizzical, deeply intelligent editor who is separated but not divorced, while Walter is worried about his health, haunted by his past, and increasingly troubled by knotty questions of both theory and practice. Walter is, always has been, and always will be a Communist, he has no doubt about that, and yet something has changed. Communism no longer explains the life he is living, the future he hoped for, or, perhaps most troubling of all, the life he has led.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681370781
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	09/19/2017
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	274,104
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Guido Morselli (1912–1973) spent his youth in Milan, where his father was an executive with a pharmaceutical company. When he was twelve his mother died from Spanish flu, an event that devastated the reserved child. After attending a Jesuit-run primary school and a classical secondary school, Morselli graduated from the Università degli Studi di Milano with a law degree in 1935. Instead of practicing law, however, he embarked on a long trip around the Continent. Though he wrote consistently from the remote town in the lake region of Lombardy where he lived alone, Morselli succeeded in publishing only two books over the course of his life: the essays Proust o del sentimento (Proust, or On Sentiment, 1943) and Realismo e fantasia (Realism and Invention, 1947). His many works of fiction, journalism, and philosophy were repeatedly rejected by publishers, and, frustrated by his perceived failures, he committed suicide in 1973. Hanging in his library was the motto Etiam si omnes, ego non (Though all do it, I do not). In fact, Morselli’s nine posthumously published novels, among them Roma senza papa (Rome Without the Pope, 1974), Divertimento 1889 (1975), and Dissipatio H.G. (The Dissolution of the Human Race, 1977), enjoyed considerable critical success. Morselli left his farm and lands to the town of Gavirate in his will, and today Parco Morselli looks south onto Lago di Varese and north toward the Alpine foothills.

Frederika Randall is a writer and a translator of Italian literature. Her translations include Luigi Meneghello’s Deliver Us; Sergio Luzzatto’s The Body of Il Duce, Padre Pio, and Primo Levi’s Resistance; and Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian, named among the best books of 2014 by The New Yorker and the New Statesman. Among her awards are a Bogliasco Fellowship, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, and, with Sergio Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize. She lives in Rome.

Elizabeth McKenzie’s novel The Portable Veblen was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for fiction. She is the author of the novel MacGregor Tells The World and story collection Stop That Girl. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and other publications. McKenzie is senior editor of the Chicago Quarterly Review and the managing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader.

Editorial Reviews

04/24/2017
A Communist’s loyalty to the cause deteriorates in Morselli’s rich and engrossing novel. In 1958, sent to Parliament in Rome as a representative of the Italian Communist Party, Walter Ferranini begins to question his beliefs. Son of an anarchist turned railway engineer, Ferranini grew up in the Reggio region of Italy in the 1920s, worshipping Sacco and Vanzetti and passionately studying biology. His father’s early death ended his formal education and turned him into a laborer, and his subsequent involvement in the Spanish Civil War necessitated escape to the United States, where he became seduced by American life, “the sweetness and the rage” of it. The disintegration of his marriage to Italian-Irish-American Nancy, a budding nationalist, sent Ferranini back to Italy, where he became a dedicated and effective labor organizer, useful enough to the party to be elected to Parliament. But there, Ferranini—a rigorously honest autodidact—is shaken by a series of encounters, first with a younger man who thinks the Communists have become corrupt, and later with party officials who warn him to end his relationship with the married Nuccia. An article he writes about the inherent violence of labor, claiming that “biology certifies that there is no getting away from the struggle for life,” finally threatens to bring upon Ferranini the wrath of the party he has so devotedly served. Morselli’s characters debate Marx, but are never mere mouthpieces. His tale of a man whose certainties are destroyed will resonate with readers of any political persuasion. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Rich and engrossing. . . . [Morselli’s] tale of a man whose certainties are destroyed will resonate with readers of any political persuasion.” —Publishers Weekly

“Morselli was a man of wide culture and vast reading, a writer of inexhaustible intellectual curiosity, possessed  of a rare talent to evoke social or historical settings.” —Charles Fantazzi

"Morselli’s novels...are serious social studies.... The uncanny, matter-of-fact depictions...give an eerie feeling of something utterly impossible becoming all-too-plausible.... Why works of such calibre went unpublished remains a mystery...his works simply remain there to be appreciated." —Nicola Rossi, complete review Quarterly

"[Morselli’s] best-laid schemes of mice and monarchs are presided over by a cool and witty intellect." —Christopher Wordsworth, The Guardian

"Morselli possessed the pure visionary’s exactness and constructive ability; each time he chose a subject, he punctiliously documented himself thereabout...an isolated experimenter.... He could prophetically interpret history as in Il Comunista or reverse it, with a good deal of fantastic inventiveness." —Alfredo Giuliani, Literary Review

"Morselli [was] a master of irony and a deft juggler of tenses." —Annapaola Cancogni, The New York Times

From the Publisher