Army of the Lost Rivers - Softcover

Carlo Sgorlon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0934977623 ISBN 13: 9780934977623

Publisher: Italica Press, 2008

Synopsis

Sgorlon's novel is based on the encounter between the Friulans and the Cossacks in this little-known tragedy of World War II. In the summer of 1944 a Cossack army complete with its dependents - women, children, and the aged, along with horses, camels, tents, and icons - descended on Friuli. In exchange for supporting the Germans against the Red Army, the Germans had promised them this region in mountainous, northeastern Italy as a new homeland, and then the Germans abandoned both the invading Cossacks and the native Friulans to their terrible fates. Against this alpine backdrop, beneath the nightly bombing flights of the Flying Fortresses and between the retreating Germans and the advancing Americans, townspeople, partisans and Cossacks are caught in an ominous web. Carlo Sgorlon has also published an English translation of his novel, "The Wooden Throne," with Italica Press. Winner of the Premio Strega in 1985.

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Reviews

In the midst of senzapatria (a state of rootless disenfranchisement), the characters of Sgorlon's bleak and brilliant novel know only the "dark Babylon of war." In the final hours of WWII the Nazis "give" Friuli, a region of Italy bordering on Austria, to the Cossack bands who have collaborated with them on the Eastern Front against the Soviet forces. Marta is the Friulian housekeeper for a Russian Jewish refugee named Esther. When Esther is deported by the Germans, Marta keeps the villa, sheltering a partisan soldier, Ivos, and refusing to accept Esther's death. As the expatriated Cossacks arrive in 1944 "like a plague of grasshoppers," the commander of the local Cossack division, Gavrila, quarters himself in Marta's villa. Entanglements, romantic and otherwise, occur. The truce established by Urvan, another commander and Marta's lover, with the Friuli villagers is broken when some Cossacks rape and kill a peasant beauty. As the atrocities multiply, it becomes clear that Cossack culture cannot long survive in the Friuli valleys. Sgorlon's (The Wooden Throne) sympathy, like his point of view, is divided evenly between the terrorized (and emotionally torn) indigenous people and the bewildered, aggressive Cossack refugees. Neo-realism may at times sit uneasily with a sort of swollen romanticismAUrvan's Slavic soul is "vast" and Marta is the eternal feminine principleAbut these moments are quite easy to ignore in this grave and intelligent novel. (Apr.) FYI: Army of the Lost Rivers won the Premio Strega when it was published in Italy in 1985.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

After the regime collapsed in July Marta thought things were going to change and the end of the war was surely at hand. With each passing day she wondered why the new government didn't sign the armistice since there was nothing else they could do now anyway. Hadn't this exact same situation brought down the previous government? But actual events were one thing and logic was quite another: they rarely coincided. Thus she couldn't even manage to reassure her landlady, Signora Esther, with whom she had lived for many long years. The Signora, a Russian Jew, was the widow of Aaron Heshel, a famous orchestra conductor. They had fled to Italy during the revolution. Whenever Marta set about convincing Esther she needn't be afraid anymore because the war would be over in two or three weeks, the words mysteriously disintegrated and speech died in her throat. By now Signora Esther was so obsessed that agents in some shadowy police barracks or hideout were spying on her and plotting to come after her that nothing could calm her. She was suspicious of anyone who set foot in her house, an old country villa just outside a tiny mountain hamlet, which she had acquired and moved into after the persecution of Jews had become overt. In fact her son Caleb had died when his bicycle went over a steep embankment as he was trying to escape from a gang of hoodlums pursuing him. She often stood at one of the attic windows, scrutinizing every movement on the path to her house. Fear left her no peace, even waking her up at night so abruptly she could hardly breathe....

Edition details

• Publisher: Italica Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0934977623
• ISBN 13: 9780934977623
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 290