A Private Affair

(Paperback)

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A powerful World War II novel about a young soldier joining the anti-German resistance in occupied Italy, this classic, which touches on everything from wartime dangers and adventures to desperate love, is regarded as one of the greatest works of twentieth-century Italian literature. Beppe Fenoglio's A Private Affair is one of the great books of the Second World War and a masterpiece of modern Italian literature. Milton is the nom de guerre of the book's protagonist, a one-time student of English literature who, in the chaotic last years of the war, has joined a partisan band. Before the war, gangly Milton was in love with the beautiful Fulvia-she let him read poetry to her- and now he hears that a friend and fellow partisan, the handsome Giorgio, was sleeping with her at the time. Jealous and furious, Milton hastens to confront Giorgio, only to discover that he has been captured by the Germans. A Private Affair tells the story of Milton's mad quest-pursued through mud and fog and rain and terror, while barely evading German and fascist patrols-to rescue his friend and settle a personal grudge from a lost world of peace. Italo Calvino praised the book for the "geometric tension" between its themes of love and war and for its unsettling and utterly persuasive mingling of absurdity and mystery. The British novelist Paul Bailey has called the novel's closing pages "superb and superbly exciting." A Private Affair is a peerless story of the violent heart and world.

Reviews

"A Private Affair has the geometric tension of a romance of mad lovers and chivalric pursuits like Orlando Furioso, and at the same time it presents the Resistance exactly as it was, inside and out, as truly as it has ever been written...with all the moral values and emotions (the more powerful, the more implicit) and fury."Italo Calvino

"Superb and superbly exciting."Paul Bailey

"No other modern Italian author has managed to produce such tellingly unstable fiction, while sustaining such a powerful narrative drive." Peter Hainsworth, TLS

Author Bio

Beppe Fenoglio (1922-1963) was an Italian writer, translator, and soldier. He briefly studied at the University of Turin before being drafted into the Italian Army in 1943. During the Nazi occupation of Italy, Fenoglio fought in the resistance. After the war, he worked as a wine merchant and wrote novels and stories that capture rural life in Northern Italy and his war experiences fighting against fascist groups. He is best known for his 1952 cycle of stories, The Twenty-Three Days of the City of Alba, and for the novel Johnny The Partisan. He died of cancer at the age of forty. Howard Curtis is an award-winning British translator of French, Italian, and Spanish fiction.