History
SynopsisPlot
The central character in this powerful and unforgiving novel is Ida Mancuso, a schoolteacher whose husband has died and whose feckless teenage son treats the war as his playground. A German soldier on his way to North Africa rapes her, falls in love with her, and leaves her pregnant with a boy whose survival becomes Ida's passion. Around these two other characters come and go, each caught up by the war which is like a river in flood. We catch glimpses of bombing raids, street crimes, a cattle car from which human cries emerge, an Italian soldier succumbing to frostbite on the Russian front, the dumb endurance of peasants who have lived their whole lives with nothing and now must get by with less than nothing.
Story
About this book
History is a novel by Elsa Morante set in Rome and its surroundings during the Second World War. At its center is Ida Mancuso, a widowed schoolteacher struggling to hold her small family together as the conflict closes in. Her older teenage son drifts through the war as though it were an adventure, while Ida herself is assaulted by a German soldier passing through on his way to North Africa. She becomes pregnant, and the child born from that violence becomes the focus of her fierce, quiet determination to survive.
Morante populates the novel with a broad cast of ordinary people swept along by forces they cannot control. Bombing raids flatten neighborhoods, a cattle car passes through carrying people whose cries can be heard from outside, and an Italian soldier freezes on the Eastern Front. Peasants who have always lived with very little now face even less. The war moves through the story like floodwater, reshaping every life it touches.
Morante wrote the novel nearly three decades after she and Alberto Moravia spent a year hiding among farming communities in the mountains south of Rome during the German occupation. That direct experience of rural wartime Italy sits visibly behind the book's detailed, ground-level portrait of civilian life under occupation.
