Features

The text itself is printed on a 60-pound paper, specially milled with The First Edition Society watermark. The typeface 10-point Trump. This volume is bound in rich, Forest Green, topgrain cowhide and decorated with 22-karat gold embossing.

Synopsis

History is the story of an Italian family's struggle through the tragically difficult period of the Second World War. Each chapter of the novel begins with a section that chronicles relevant international events that occurred during each of the years of this epic work. For the author, however, it is not historical events themselves that are important, but the effect they have on human beings. As a result, it is the family of Ida Ramundo that is the main focus of Morante's narrative.

Ida is a widowed, half-Jewish, prematurely gray schoolteacher. At the beginning of the story, we find her living in a poor tenement in Rome with her feisty adolescent son, Nino. After being raped by a homesick young German soldier, Ida becomes the mother of a second child—Useppe. Through the lives of this small family, Morante conveys something of the sense of what it was like to live through all the variety of catastrophic circumstances human beings experience—war, poverty, disease, despair.

Compassion is at the heart of Morante's enormously commanding style. The obvious deep affection she has for her characters is so magically contagious that the reader cannot help also caring deeply for them. Morante makes the time and place of 1940s Rome come alive in an intensely cinematic way. The combination of her passionate concern for people and her attention to historical realities makes History a novel that is continuously touching without ever being sentimental or parochial.

More than any other popular novel of recent memory, History manages to convey the sense of weight, depth of concern and feeling that characterized the great novels of Dostoevsky, Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy.

About the Author

Elsa Morante (1918-1985) was born in Rome to a father who was a schoolteacher and a native of Sicily, while her mother came originally from Moderna in northern Italy. She was thus the inheritor of two very different—some would say contrasting—strains, which no doubt put her at an advantage in writing about the various regional manners and idioms of Italy.

An intensely private person, Morante gained her independence at the age of seventeen. Even during her marriage to novelist Alberto Moravia, Morante maintained her own apartment in which to write. During the three years it took her to write History, Morante lived practically as a recluse in her small apartment off Rome's Piazza de Popolo, with hardly any other company than her cat and the Mozart records that she played every morning to warm up for writing.

Morante's literary reputation has been on the rise in Italy since the publication of her first major work, House of Liars, in 1948, which won a top Italian literary prize, the Primo Viareggio, and a large and devoted readership. Her next novel, Arturo's Island (1957), also received a prestigious Italian literary prize—the Premio Stega. Morante was also a prolific poet, often including verse and prose poetry in her fictional works.

Other works by Morante include: House of Liars, Arturo's Island, The Secret Game, Lies and Witchcraft, Alibi, The Andalusian Shawl, The World Saved by the Little Boys, Aracoeli, Churchill at War : The Memoirs of Churchill's Physician 1940-45, The Blessed Propagandist of Heaven, and For or Against the Atomic Bomb.

Condition

Near fine. Binding tight and square. Pages are tight and clean without crease or stain. No indication of soiling, scuffing, or wear. The condition of this beautiful volume would be, without equivocation, "Fine" with a single exception: the previous owner's name is inscribed/stamped on the front and end papers.