2023-08-15 18:23:05
by IDA BOZZI
The summer month can become, in novels, the time of murky crimes or amorous adventures. But the summer of literature also narrates the suffused shades of Finnish summers or the tragic memories of Japan
In the Mediterranean countries, August is the time of the heatwave. In literature, on the other hand, the month has many faces: in post-war stories it evokes the idyll of the countryside and childhood, in thrillers it becomes the background of exasperated loves and hates, in contemporary literature it can even become the favorite time for angry thugs of the French province, of the murderous murders in the Basque hinterland, or even of the crimes in the semi-deserted buildings of bourgeois Milan. And if for Europe August means a holiday (also in Finland), for the Japanese it is instead the month of a chilling memory: the bombs of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945).
As for thrillers, every summer Sellerio offers collections of detective stories with a summer background: this year the publisher republishes Viaggiare in giallo (2023), with the stories of Alicia Gimnez-Bartlett, Marco Malvaldi, Antonio Manzini, Francesco Recami, Alessandro Robecchi, Gaetano Savatteri . The novel The north side of the heart (Rizzoli, 2022), prequel to the Baztn Trilogy by the Spanish writer (born in the Basque Country) Dolores Redondo takes place in August: August is the month in which detective Amaia is recruited in the investigative team of Aloisius Dupree and sent to New Orleans on the trail of a serial killer, until suddenly recalled in his land, the valley of the Baztn (the Bidasoa River in Basque), where crimes mix with local legends. Among the by now classic thrillers, Camilleri’s more summery La vampa d’agosto (Sellerio, 2006) with an inspector Montalbano furious because he is forced to work while his colleagues enjoy their holidays. With a Milanese and Augustan setting, with atmospheres of the time, two detective novels from the last century, Maledetto Ferragosto (Mondadori, 1992) by Renato Olivieri, detective story from the series of commissioner Ambrosio, and Thief of August 15th by Raffaele Crovi (Frassinelli, 1984) .
There are many stories of summer loves, adventures or overwhelming passions that change lives: the novel Agosto (Rubbettino, 2023) by Rocco Carbone (1962 – 2008) by Rocco Carbone (1962 – 2008) returns to the bookstore with a new preface by Edoardo Albinati, the story of the indolent and hot summer of a young journalist who drags himself through a deserted city in search of news, until he is overwhelmed by love for a beautiful stranger. Quite the opposite of Raffaele La Capria’s beautiful day in Ferito a morte, cornerstone of the Italian literary summer and Strega Prize in 1961, the year of its release for Bompiani: in the novel the carefree youth, embodied in the dip in the sea of a group of friends , and disillusionment comes only with the years, with returning home, as defeated, with compromises in work and in love. And to think that in Italy after the war and still at the dawn of the boom, summer evoked the enchantment of nature, children’s games, farm work, rural festivals, abandonment in the fields after work: in posthumous book Feria d’agosto (Einaudi, 1960) by Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) contains, in addition to texts on myths and childhood, 24 stories in a rural setting. Quite the opposite of the contemporary summer narrated by Nicolas Mathieu in the book with which he won the Goncourt in 2018, And the children after them (Marsilio, 2019): the raids of a trio of fourteen year olds in a French province poor in dreams and of hopes for the future, between drugs, alcohol, motorcycle thefts, frustrated families and alcoholics who define disadvantaged is wrong, because, as Mathieu writes, they are normal.
Instead, summer days in Finland were dreamy, at least according to the writer Tove Jansson (1914-2001) who narrated her childhood with her grandmother on an island in the far north in the short story collection The Summer Book (Hyperborea, 1989) of the country: an education in the rustic life of the coast, and solitary life in particular. Summer radiation takes on another meaning in the book Summer light and immediately night (Hyperborea, 2016) by Jn Kalman Stefnsson, who in an Iceland far from Reykjavik recounts the almost frenzied activity of the inhabitants in the months when the sun is high (even the prose is very rhythmic): the shadow of the Arctic winter hangs over everyone, which will soon arrive, but also the hidden darkness of unfulfilled lives and loves close to the end.
And in August the story doesn’t stop. The atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945: the Canadian writer of Japanese origin Aki Shimazaki returns to the day of the catastrophe in the novel The Weight of Secrets (Feltrinelli, 2016) to tell a private story. Yukiko killed her father on that August day, a few hours before the explosion of the bomb, and she tells her daughter the story and the way in which she, then, she was hidden by the much greater tragedy of the atomic. Nor did the wars stop in August: in Paris, on August 1, 1937, around 200,000 people paraded through the streets of the city for the funeral procession of Gerda Taro: the story of the war photographer and reporter narrated in the novel The girl with the Leica (Guanda) with which Helena Janeczek won the 2018 Strega Prize. The photographer had died on the battlefield during the Spanish Civil War, crushed by a tank in Brunete (Spain) in the summer of ’37.
August 15, 2023 (change August 15, 2023 | 18:04)
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