FRANQOIS BONDY
137
novel enters squarely into the Italian present-day reality. Walter
Ferrannini is a leading Communist, a member of Parliament. His
roots are in the cooperative movement of Emilia. He has spent many
years in exile, mainly in the United States, where he married and
divorced and to which he returns at the end of the novel for a short
and unhappy visit. He has to sit in judgment with more important
party leaders on a heretic who rejects the bourgeois degeneration of
the party and, for reasons of moral coherence, remains an unrecon–
structed Stalinist. Ferrannini himself becomes, without being aware
of it, a deviationist, because Alberto Moravia persuades him to
express his thoughts on work in
Nuovi Argomenti.
He is more influ–
enced by his observations on Russia and by his reading of Hannah
Arendt than by the accepted ideology. This, one guesses, will not
lead to his exclusion from the party, which, however, frowns on his
liaison with a married woman . Apart from a short novel,
Una cam–
pagna elettorale,
written in the early fifties by Enzo Bettiza, this is the
only Italian novel to date dealing convincingly with the life of Italian
Communists and their hierarchy.
Recently a fifth short novel has
appeared-Disslflatio
H.
C.
The
initials stand for
humani generis.
The narrator alone is spared by an
accident of which he becomes only gradually aware. Mankind has
vanished in an unfathomable catastrophe without leaving any bodily
trace. The survivor wanders through Crisopolis (Zurich) and the
mountains, reliving memories and pondering the strange fate of
being, perhaps, the last man on earth. Here is, again, a hypothetical
intellectual premise, but also a strangely tender exercise in solip–
sism, a most radical "Goodbye to all that."
Guido Morselli has become famous only in
~he
last four years,
but he had published two books much earlier-one on Proust and
another on
Realism and Imagination,
which did not attract much atten–
tion. A copy of the second book with a personal dedication to
Morselli's teacher, the philosopher Banfi, was recently found on a
carretto,
uncut.
One may wonder about this author who appears as much at
home among priests as among Communist
apparatchiks
and who can
evoke so perfectly the small old world of Umberto's Italy. The ques–
tion, however, should not be, Who is Morselli? but, Who
was
Morselli? In the late summer of 1974, this sixty-one-year-old
descendant of a wealthy family from northern Italy ·shot himself in
his villa near Varese, a few days after two more publishers had
