FRANQOIS BONDY
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reformists, just waiting for the right moment to offer itself as an
ally." Written nearly twenty years ago, this is all too obvious today.
In
Roma senza Papa
and in
Il Communista,
Morselli has evoked
two ideological world powers shrinking into shapeless provinciality.
His main theme may have been provinciality itself-the provincial
Italy of long ago with a style of its own, the new provincialism of
post-Fascist Italy, rejecting not only the rhetoric but any creed what–
soever, any style, any faith in its own destiny or meaning. In
Controp–
passato prossimo
Italy is wiped out in a few days, a simple geographi–
cal fact. This provincialism is often presented with parallels to
Switzerland . It is the recognition of a reality but also of the loss of
something undefinable yet perhaps precious.
This summary cannot do justice to a writer whose four or five
more novels, several stories, essays, and plays await publication.
What about his last work,
Dissipatio H. C.?
We may read it as the
strangest exercise ever in autobiography. One man is separated
through death from mankind. The author who always liked to play
with hypotheses made of this man a survivor and condemned all oth–
ers to doom. But this novel, completed shortly before the author's
own death, may be read as a description of his suicide
at rovescio-in
reverse.
