Beautiful Antonio ticked a lot of my boxes. It's set between WW1 and WW2, with themes including fascism, hypocrisy, and gender inequality. Unfortunately I wasn't able to give the book my full attention, and read large chunks without digesting them. So it's a good job Tim Parks, the British novelist and translator of Italian works, had written a helpful introduction.
The story is set in Italy, the Sicilian town of Catania to be precise, and concerns a sensitive young man named Antonio, reckoned by family, friends, and random women to be the epitome of an "Italian stallion". All is not as it seems tho'.
Tim Parks suggests the book's characters yearn "for virility and aggression", but are "excluded from events by their very sensibility". Patrick Creagh's translation gets this across by juxtaposing the crude slang of dialogue with introspective descriptions of feelings. Antonio's father claims, "My son has a cock that could drill a hole through stone!". The sensitive young man "reddened and clasped a hand over his heart, feeling it unroll and unravel from his breast as when a spindle drops".
Early in the book there's a scene in a brothel which allows Brancati to expose the moral hypocrisy that infuses the story. Antonio's father comments to his wife, "Your son comes here to get engaged, and the very first evening he lands up in a whorehouse!" The mother retorts that the young man is a bachelor, "with a bitter allusion to those who did likewise despite being bound by obligations of conjugal fidelity".
Antonio, his father, and the whole community are fixated on the idea of male virility. They "worship the god of lust, the great god Libido". Antonio's cousin Edoardo, returning from his internment during the war muses, "Just think of all the things you could have done if you hadn't buried yourself night and day in your one, single obsession, and pined your bloody life away!". What will Edoardo do with his newly restored freedom, and what might Antonio do if he could free himself from his fixation?
Since reaching the end of the book I've discovered there's an Italian movie adaptation, released in 1960 and starring Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale. One for a rainy Sunday afternoon perhaps.
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