The essayist and journalist who was responsible for the cultural pages and deputy director of «La Stampa» passed away at the age of 91. He discovered important unpublished works by Fenoglio and Pavese
We should begin to say, remembering Lorenzo Mondo, who passed away on April 19 at the Molinette hospital in Turin, that he was an intellectual from another time: a generation of critics who understood the so-called militant criticism as a service to the reader, far from exhibition of himself and the narcissistic trait that dominates today. Alongside the personal data (he was born in 1931), there was the typically Turin understatement, which underlined the elegant and apparently detached character with which he approached his works, especially contemporary Italian fiction, which was accompanied by a sensitivity towards French literature. Like Edoardo Sanguineti, Marziano Guglielminetti, Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, Guido Davico Bonino, Claudio Magris, Mondo was a pupil of Giovanni Getto, to whom we owe a rich school of textual interpretation and stylistic analysis, tools that he obviously used lightly in his reviews. , always aimed at critical judgment as well as the description of the work.
Mondo has traveled three parallel tracks for a long life. On the one hand, cultural journalism, practiced daily for “La Stampa”, whose cultural pages he had long been responsible for before becoming deputy director, on the other, non-fiction, and finally fiction. The essayist reserved numerous surprises for Italian literature of the twentieth century, focusing above all on Piedmontese literature, particularly on the beloved Pavese, on which he had graduated, and Fenoglio. It is due to him, in the early 90s, the discovery of the politically scandalous Secret notebook by Pavese. In 1961 he had dedicated a monograph to Pavese and later, with Italo Calvino, the cure of Easier released in 1966 for Einaudi, the publishing house where Mondo worked before moving to journalism. Mondo is also responsible for the publication of the Partisan notes by Fenoglio, found by chance by a friend of the writer in a landfill on the banks of the Tanaro. He is the curator, again for Einaudi in 1968, of the first edition of Partisan Johnny. Other “loves” of him were Gozzano, Cagna, Sciascia, Bufalino, friends Primo Levi and Arpino …
The narrator used the lessons learned from his beloved writers: essentiality of prose, sobriety of style, anti-heroism. In 1988 he left Garzanti with The fathers of the hillswhich Magris, in the 2008 reprint of Rizzoli, defined an “epos” rather than a novel, where Mondo let the fragmentary memories of Monferrato emerge capriciously, from the bloody clashes between Franks and Lombards and from the battle of Refrancore to the grotesque nineteenth-century story of Don Grignaschi, the priest who wanted to become a messiah, from the adventures of partisan children to the tragic lives of emigrants in America to work in the mines. His latest book, released in 2020 for Sellerio, Happy to grow upis the return to Monferrato: a coming-of-age novel set between 1943 and 1945 that narrates Guido’s departure from bombed Turin to take refuge in the hills the family originates from: having ended up in a boarding school-orphanage thanks to an uncle the monsignor, he will again choose to escape to give himself up to a difficult life, but also full of trials to be overcome happily. There is Pavese and there is Fenoglio, in the stories of Mondo. Echoes of the dearest figures. A long loyalty never betrayed.
April 19, 2022 (change April 19, 2022 | 16:31)
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