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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Ennio Flaiano and His Italy
ISBN# 9780838642139
Reviewed by: Mark Epstein, Princeton University
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This book is divided into three chapters. The first deals mainly with Flaiano's early works, the novel Tempo di uccidere (1947), various scripts that use the novel as the basis for a film, and other works related to anti-colonialism. The second deals primarily with the works Flaiano produced as a result of his work in cinema. Their "fragmentary" nature is explained and evaluated in a postmodern theoretical framework, in which the sign's 'slipperiness' and perhaps 'slippage' are positive features. The last chapter extends this 'opening,' by viewing Flaiano as an author who was moving beyond/outside the determinants of Italian national culture and, as a precursor of contemporary trends, anticipating forms of what one would call "literary globalization."
Marisa Trubiano's volume covers an impressive panorama of both Flaiano's own production and the relevant secondary literature on the subject. I find two points in her analysis most convincing. First: Flaiano's critical relation to fascist colonialism, a topic that was mostly marginal in post-WWII examinations of fascism (and its relations to Italian nationalism and more or less tacit forms of imperial nostalgia), even among professedly more progressive/radical intellectuals and groups. Second: the complicities and compromises incurred by many Italian intellectuals during the "regime" and during the transition from fascism to post-WWII "antifascismo." Flaiano's irony directed at some of the more sanctimonious declarations of "clean breaks" is sobering.
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