Synopses & Reviews
In the bitterly cold winter of 1943, the Italian countryside is torn apart by violence as partisans wage a guerilla war against the occupying German army and their local fascist allies. In the midst of this conflict, a ragtag group of fascist supporters captures a woman in the late stages of pregnancy. Suspecting her of being in league with the partisans, they hastily put her on “trial” by improvising a war tribunal one night in the choir stalls of the abandoned monastery that serves as their hide-out. This sham court convicts the woman and sentences her to die—but not until her child has been born. When a young seminarian visits the monastery and tries to dissuade the fascist band from executing their sentence, the absurd tragedy of the woman’s fate is cast in stark relief. The child’s birth approaches, an unnerving anticipation unfolds, and tension mounts ominously among the characters and within their individual psyches.
Based on a number of incidents that took place in Abruzzo during the war, Laudomia Bonanni’s compact and tragic novel explores the overwhelming conflicts between ideology and community, justice and vengeance. The story is embedded in the cruel reality of Italian fascism, but its themes of revenge, sacrifice, and violence emerge as universal, delivered in prose that is at once lyrical and brutal.In her native Italy, Bonanni, a writer of journalism and critical prose as well as fiction, is hailed as one of the strongest proponents of post-war realism, and this is the first of her novels to be made available to Anglophone readers. Translators Susan Stewart and Sara Teardo render Bonanni’s singular style—both sparse and emotive, frank and poetic—into readable, evocative English.
Review
Many readers remember the firebombing of Dresden in World War II largely becauseee of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Undoubtedly, the destruction of Hamburg, Germany, as the result of massive Allied bombing raids in July 1943 will become associated with this slim yet compelling memoir by German novelist Nossack (1901-77). His eyewitness account of the 1800-plane bombardment was written three months later and published in Germany in 1948. Nossack vividly depicts the human side of war, from the approaching terror to the city's final devastation. Translated by Agee (Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany), Nossack's prose is both direct and dreamlike. The text is complemented by a portfolio of 13 unforgettable scenes of destruction by Hamburg photographer Erich Andres. In his introduction, Agee portrays Nossack as an Orwell-like writer of conscience who was nearly forgotten after his death. This book deserves a place next to John Hersey's Hiroshima on the top shelf of m(Library Journal, Jan 15 2005 )
Review
"This is a brief book of extraordinary power. . . . Nossack succeeds . . . in conveying a remarkable sense of what it is that bombing on such a genocidal scale does to those who experience it. . . . A classic of its kind."
Review
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The Reprisal is a starkly haunting and disturbing novel, stylistically and thematically innovative; its English translation should be of interest to contemporary feminist criticism of all stripes, students and scholars of the Italian novel, neorealism, Fascism, and the literature of World War II. Laudomia Bonannis novel, completed in 1985, was only published in Italy posthumously, in 2003. Now,
The Reprisal and Bonanni can assume their rightful place in the canon of Italian novels about the war and resistance, along with authors such as Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, and Elsa Morante. In this eloquent and accurate translation, Susan Stewart and Sara Teardo provide a welcome rehabilitation of one of the most penetrating portrayals of cruelty and poverty under the conditions of war, and of the deep wellspring of strength of female archaic resistance.”
Review
“I have before me the book of an unknown woman, Laudomia Bonanni. This work emerged from a competition and won a prize for literature. I am wary of such prizes, but I must admit there are exceptions and this Laudomia truly deserves to be brought out from the shadows. She reveals a narrative strength that must not conclude here. She is sure to go a long way.”
Review
“Bonanni's tragic, brutal novella is exquisitely translated for the first time by poet Stewart and scholar Teardo. . . . Bonanni's surreal and grotesque scenes make the madness of the men, and their primordial misogyny, graphically palpable. It is a travesty that English language readers have been denied this profound, gritty novel for so long as it raises serious questions about humanity's ability to justify violence.”
Review
“Laudomia Bonannis The Reprisal, available in English translation for the first time thanks to the University of Chicago Press, is a disorienting, confusing novel, and all the more successful for it. Initially rejected by Bonannis publisher in 1985 . . . this novel could have become any number of others instead, or so easily could have not existed at all. It occupies—perhaps especially in translation—a rich liminal space appropriate to its recounting of difficult-to-pin-down events. . . . Bonannis purposes seem to be moral as much as aesthetic, as well as gendered: a driving force here is a no-punches-pulled critique of the warmongering of men. . . . Bonanni simultaneously undercuts the presumptuous foolishness of such masculine schemes and offsets that with a certain sympathy toward these men, who have been overwhelmed by and swept up in global events so much larger than their own village lives—yet she never lightens the load of culpability for their own actions. That uncomfortable, unresolvable balance makes The Reprisal a challenging, bleak, and haunting read—and a vital one.”
Synopsis
One didn't dare to inhale for fear of breathing it in. It was the sound of eighteen hundred airplanes approaching Hamburg from the south at an unimaginable height. We had already experienced two hundred or even more air raids, among them some very heavy ones, but this was something completely new. And yet there was an immediate recognition: this was what everyone had been waiting for, what had hung for months like a shadow over everything we did, making us weary. It was the end.Novelist Hans Erich Nossack was forty-two when the Allied bombardments of German cities began, and he watched the destruction of Hamburgand#8212;the city where he was born and where he would later dieand#8212;from across its Elbe River. He heard the whistle of the bombs and the singing of shrapnel; he watched his neighbors flee; he wondered if his homeand#8212;and his manuscriptsand#8212;would survive the devastation. The End is his terse, remarkable memoir of the annihilation of the city, written only three months after the bombing. A searing firsthand account of one of the most notorious events of World War II, The End is also a meditation on war and hope, history and its devastation. And it is the rare book, as W. G. Sebald noted, that describes the Allied bombing campaign from the German perspective.
In the first English-language edition of The End, Nossack's text has been crisply translated by Joel Agee and is accompanied by the photographs of Erich Andres. Poetic, evocative, and yet highly descriptive, The End will prove to be, as Sebald claimed, one of the most important German books on the firebombing of that country.
"A small but critical book, something to read in those quiet moments when we wonder what will happen next."and#8212;Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. A former MacArthur fellow, she is the author of five earlier critical studies, including Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), winner of the Christian Gauss award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Truman Capote Award. She is also the author of five books of poems, most recently Red Rover (2008) and Columbarium (2003), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. These titles, along with The Open Studio (2005) and The Forest (1995), are all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Joel Agee
The End: Hamburg 1943and#160;
Hans Erich Nossack
Erich Andres: Photographs
Scott Denham