Ruin

by Beppe Fenoglio, John Shepley (Translator)

Overview

Ruin is an acclaimed 1954 novel by Italian Beppe Fenoglio. It's the story of Augustine Braida, a boy who serves the Rabino family, whose first-person account of life in Langhe paints a vivid portrait of  early twentieth-century Italian peasant life. Told with terrible humility and great force, it is a compassionate and harrowing narrative of peasant endurance in the face of overwhelming hardship.

Born into a working-class family in the town of Alba lying in that part of the Piedmont called LeLanghe, Beppe Fenoglio (1922-1963) belonged to the generation of young Italian writers whose works were molded by their World War II experience and the anti-Fascist Resistance many took part in. Fenoglio fought as a partisan against the German troops occupying Italy, and the major part of his literature is connected with the events of the time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780910395830
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	05/01/1995
Edition description:	1
Pages:	94
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Beppe Fenoglio (born Giuseppe Fenoglio 1 March 1922, Alba (CN) - 18 February 1963, Turin) was an Italian writer.

Editorial Reviews

Congratulations are due the publisher for bringing out the first English-language edition of this seminal work of Italian neorealism. Widely considered one of the most influential Italian writers of the 20th century, Fenoglio (1922-1963) invests the struggles of common men and women with dignity and grace. Here, Agostino, the son of peasants, is sent to work as a bond servant for Tobia, a farmer so avaricious that he virtually works his own wife to death. Meanwhile, Agostino's beloved younger brother, sent by a benefactress to a seminary, suffers under equally harsh conditions, and the young women Agostino meets are bullied by their families into marrying cruel but relatively prosperous older men. Fenoglio's hero remains unbowed--instead, his trials strengthen his determination. Shepley's translation suggests, if not exactly replicates, the power of Fenoglio's prose. Without imitating local dialects, importing heavy symbols or invoking explicit literary conventions, Fenoglio compresses language so that it approximates the speech of peasants. In all, a deeply felt, deeply moving work. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This first-person narrative about the hardships of peasant life in Italy opens with a son's journey home from his position as a bond servant to bury his father. His despair and powerlessness over his "life sentence" are clear when he says "Here I'd just buried my father and already I was going back to take up my whole miserable life again, and not even his death could do anything to change my fate." He flirts with the idea of drowning himself, but instead returns to his position and labors to send his family money. The one spark of happiness in his life, his love for another bond servant in the house of his employer, is snuffed when her parents arrange a marriage for her that is financially advantageous for them. The narrator accepts this pain as he'd accepted his life sentence. "Ruin" is the story of the pain in life's passages; the narrator's humility, as much as his pain, inspires compassion for him and for the pain of all people.

Lindsay Throm